Audio Book Description:
"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 i do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?" In an attemp to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear onan array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after wedie. She begins the journey inrural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists haveinstalled equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrollsin an English medium school, getselectronmagnetically haunted ata University in Ontario, and visits a DukeUniversity professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Herhistorical wanderings unearth soul- seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves` heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that establishedlegal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive.
