Long Live the Ghosties

I really have no reason to read an actual debunking book, and no desire to read a book about the afterlife by anyone who's not looking at it skeptically. So of course, this is the book for me. Brief, funny, flippant, Mary Roach's Spook is about the search for life after death, or the immortal soul. She comes at it as a skeptic, but as a skeptic who'd kind of like to be convinced--her goal is not to debunk, but to figure out what someone reasonable and rational will find in the field.

What I love is that she really picks out the fun bits--not just of her subject, but of anything even tangentially interesting. And I mean tangential--when mentioning the hymn included on a recording of spirits singing through mediums, she refers to "'There's a Land,' a anthem made famous by renowned English contralto Madame Clara Butt." But this is too charming to pass up, so she follows it up with a footnote that begins, "Oh, for the days when a nation's highest-paid recording star could be a beefy six-foot-two oysterman's daughter named Clara Butt."

But mostly, she's simultaneously amused and respectful, eager and dubious. It's a light book, not in-depth, but she clearly did her research, and the topics she covers--the spiritualist craze of the late 19th century, various attempts to weigh and measure the soul, out-of-body experiments--are thorough enough that I feel like I understand how hopeful, eager people are convinced while the rest of us remain doubtful.

I've heard good things about Stiff, her other book, about all the various and sundry things that might happen to dead bodies in America. I don't think I've really got the constitution for that today. But if she can find humor there, I'm going to start steeling my stomach now.