Mary Roach's book has two great strengths. The first is that she's damnably funny; she brings humor to any place of uncertainty and any place of anyone's absolute certainty. The second strength is that she's humble and friendly; her prose is downright gregarious, so that reading often comes off as chatting with a well-versed (but not know-it-all) friend. She is less interested with one person being right and more interested in finding every available source of information, which often means trascending two sides of an argument and finding bystanders. In her opening she casts doubt on both religion and science, doubting and chiding them paragraph-for-paragraph, setting us up for the spirited search of spirits she's about to embark on. Spook provides neither New Age pseudo-support for every little possibility of the supernatural, nor mean-spirited skepticism. The aforementioned two classes seem to dominate far too much of these subjects, making much of the discourse unbearable. If you need her to seriously lean towards orthodoxy or the scientific method, don't bother reading Spook. She will not bow to your paradigm, and really, if you're so certain that you cannot stand anything but confirmation of your belief or disbelief, why do you even bother reading about these matters? You're done. Get a less parasitic hobby than arguing with people over their interests. Roach is wise enough to observe interests and report them in detail, even when they run as absurdly as a court case over the existence (and desires) of a ghost, or a real life sample of ectoplasm. It's wonderful to read someone who can be funny about this sensitive matter without ever coming across as hating one of the embattled sides. It allows me to forgive her naive definitions of "proof," "evidence," "belief," and "knowledge," because by the end you aren't reading Plato. You're reading the observations of a friend, from whom you have much to learn and much to laugh about.

In short - this is a book titled "Spook" and only subtitled "Science Tackles the Afterlife," and the photo of the author on the dustjacket shows her laughing hysterically. If you pick up and carry it all the way to the checkout desk, you know what you're in for. You're only lucky that she went through such a thorough journey of research and observation of other people's research.