When portraying everyone other than the author's voice, the narrator sounds like. The second travesty here is the narration. In this case, the lens of her personal experience serves to deaden (sorry) the topics explored, because the fact that it's all garbage is a foregone conclusion, so why bother suffering through it with her? Certain sections (I'm looking at you, ectoplasm) are far too long already, and the author's attitude makes them even more tedious. I guess that's what I'd consider the first mistake that lead to the existence of this audiobook: the majority of 'Spook' is simply not science (no matter what the psychics and ghost-hunters believe) and Roach's skepticism is never challenged in any interesting ways. She has a real talent for using narratives of her personal experiences to bring scientific and historical topics to life. Let me start off by saying that I absolutely loved Mary Roach's 3 other books available on Audible. 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. 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. 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. 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. '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 that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my laptop?'

Spook roach