I absolutely love Mary Roach's books. This book is another winner. She turns what could be dry and boring into fun, humourous, intelligent, and insightful reading. You may not walk away with a grand theory, but you do gain lots of interesting facts and a deeper appreciation for the subject matter.
This isn't a book for the religious. She makes that clear in the introduction:
The crumbling walls of Jericho. Jesus walking atop stormy seas with palms upturned. The raising of Lazarus -- depicted in my mother's Bible as a sort of Boris Karloff knockoff, wrapped in mummy's rags and rising stiffly from the waist. I could not believe these things had happened, because another god, the god who wore lab glasses and know how to use a slide rule, wanted to know how, scientifically speaking these things could be possible. Faith did not take, because science kept putting it on the spot. ... Was Lazarus a simple case of premature entombment? I wasn't sayhing these didn't happen. I was just saying I'd feel better with some proof.
Of course, science doesn't dependably deliver trusts. It is as fallible as the men and women who undertake it. Science has the answer to every question that can be asked. However, science reserves the right to change that answer should additional data become available. ...
Flawed as it is, science remains the most solid god I've got. And so I decided to turn to it, to see what it had to say on the topic of life after death.
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