"What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's
that--the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my
me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is
there a place to plug in my laptop?"
In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to
bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers:
scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or
disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in
rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University
of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment
near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the
way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically
haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University
professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her
historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged
through cadavers and calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that
established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample
of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive.
