Awards🏆Nominee (2006) - Macavity Award - (Nonfiction)Contributor(s):Author: Mary RoachWhat happens when we die? Does the light just go out and thats thatthe 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 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. Review citationsKirkus Reviews - pg. 835 - 08/01/2005Publishers Weekly / Best Of The Best/Highly Recommended - pg. 54 - 08/22/2005Publishers Weekly / Exceptional Presentation - pg. 54 - 08/22/2005Publishers Weekly / Book Of Special Distinction - pg. 54 - 08/22/2005Publishers Weekly / Top 15 Book Of The Year - pg. 54 - 08/22/2005Publishers Weekly / Highly Recommended - pg. 54 - 08/22/2005Library Journal - pg. 174 - 09/01/2005Ingram Advance - pg. 43 - 10/01/2005Booklist - pg. 23 - 09/01/2005Newsweek - pg. 63 - 10/10/2005New York Times - pg. 9 - 10/09/2005Entertainment Weekly - pg. 79 - 10/21/2005People Weekly - pg. 56 - 10/31/2005Library Journal Prepub Alert - pg. 102 - 06/01/2005Discover - pg. 70 - 03/01/2006Booksense 76 October 2005 - pg. 1 - 10/01/2005Entertainment Weekly - pg. 68 - 04/18/2008Entertainment Weekly - pg. 67 - 03/22/2013