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Torontoist Reads
Welcome to our new revived self-indulgent weekly feature, Torontoist Reads, where we will blab on and on about whatever book we happen to be enjoying at the moment and it will probably have almost nothing to do with Toronto, except that you can often spot us reading on the TTC, especially at this time of year.
Our inaugural title is Mary Roach’s Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, a romp through the history of scientific theories regarding life after death. Roach has a wicked sense of humour and a healthy (though occasionally intrusive, as she freely admits herself) sense of skepticism. She is game to try just about anything, though, including a weekend at Medium School (where she learns that she herself is not psychic, nor, probably, is anyone else who has to enroll in such a workshop) and a week of racing around India researching claims of reincarnation with a scientist who makes that his life’s work. She talks to research scientists at universities all over North America who are studying theories regarding everything from out-of-body near death experiences to the presence of infrasound and electromagnetic waves in areas considered haunted. Roach also gives quite a thorough overview of the surprising history of scientific attempts to examine the afterlife, from Dr. Duncan McDougall, whose early (and faulty) attempts to weigh the soul resulted in the notorious (and probably inaccurate) notion of twenty-one grams, to the thoroughly bizarre Spiritualism movement of the early 20th century (they were big into seances and ectoplasm…and insanity, apparently). The history is fascinating, especially since Roach loves to go off on eye-poppingly weird tangents about people like the woman who gave birth to rabbits (or at least said she did, until one obstetrician, more astute than the rest, we presume, pointed out that it was clearly a disgusting hoax).
Roach examines her subject matter with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a very bright child, and makes the most of an irresistibly strange topic. She is also not above mocking people with funny names in her footnotes, which is why we’re a little bit in love.