Six Feet Over · Adventures in the Afterlife

"Equal parts Groucho Marx Stephen Jay Gould, both enlightening entertaining."— Sunday Denver Post Rocky Mountain News

The best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers now trains her considerable wit curiosity on the human soul. What happens when we die? Does the light just go out 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 lap-top?" In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary 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 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 visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged thru cadavers calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts the last surviving sample of ectoplasm in a Cambridge University archive.