Whistling past the graveyard

Every once in a while, when I have nothing else to write about, this hole in the blogosphere will be filled with an old review of a book still very much worth reading. The following piece appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times in 2005, a year before I retired.

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.
By Mary Roach.
Norton, 2005, available in paperback, $13.95.

By Henry Kisor

There are three kinds of people in the world: Those who believe in an afterlife, those who don't, and those who whistle past the graveyard.

Mary Roach sides with the nervous undecideds. She is the author of Stiff, a 2003 best seller that explored in exquisitely grisly (and hilarious) detail what happens to our bodies when we die. Her new book, Spook, chronicles her equally rollicking attempt to find out what transpires when we shuffle off our mortal coil -- what happens to our spirits when they leave their temporal homes.

Or, rather, if we really have spirits, or souls, or ghosts, or whatever you want to call them.

Never mind Heaven, Paradise, or the nonsectarian Great Beyond. Roach is not out to debunk religion, for she has the good sense to separate faith from science. Those are two distinct and parallel realities that don't mix well (a fact that seems to escape rural school boards with unintelligent designs for their science curricula).

What she wants to know is if there's actually something quantifiable within us -- call it a floating consciousness -- that leaves our bodies when we die and goes somewhere to say hello to all those consciousnesses that have gone before.

What is this consciousness? What is its shape? What color is it? How much does it weigh? How does it get in there? And afterwards, where does it go?

Or are these silly questions? Maybe the late Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, had the right idea: "You, your joys, your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

"But can you prove that, Dr. Crick?" Roach asks. It is apparent from the beginning that she wants to believe that humans have a soul, but she is also a skeptic. She wants proof, one way or the other.

First she travels to India to find out if the disembodied human spirit can set up housekeeping in someone else down the pike -- in other words, if it can be reincarnated. The reincarnation researchers she observes may be serious scientists, but their eagerness to believe seriously affects their techniques. There's lots to debunk, and debunk she does.

She enrolls in a school for mediums and learns their parlor tricks as well as weird practices (you'll never be able to watch James Van Praagh again without bursting into laughter). But she is willing to give some of them the benefit of the doubt: "I believe that they believe, honestly and with conviction, that they are getting information from paranormal sources. It's just a different interpretation of a set of facts."

Most mediums prosper, she argues, because their clients are so uncritical, so credulous, so eager to believe that they will grasp at any straw of possibility and ignore a mountain of contrary evidence. Who cares if Uncle Joe never owned the Mercedes the medium said he drove if he actually wore the blue tie she says he mentioned? (Bet you've got one in your closet, too. Who doesn't?)

Roach visits weird historical researchers, such as the doughty Duncan Macdougall, a Victorian doctor who put moribund TB patients on a scale at the moment of their deaths to see if he could weigh their escaping souls.

Most fascinating of all was Harry Price, a famous magician and spirit researcher in the 1920s, who proved that the filmy "ectoplasm" a celebrated medium regurgitated was actually cheesecloth smuggled into the room in her vagina.

She takes us to a University of Virginia operating room where doctors have installed a laptop near the ceiling, out of reach, to study out-of-body experiences during surgery. If someone's spirit takes a brief stroll, perhaps it will report what it saw on the laptop screen. So far, no dice.

In the end Roach answers her questions with a resounding "Who knows?" The existence of the human soul is not proven, she avers -- nor is it disproven.

That would have been a disappointing anticlimax if this book had been written by a sober and single-minded debunker of the paranormal, one whose mission is to annihilate hokum wherever it might be. But Mary Roach is warm, deliciously witty and has the happy knack of unearthing humor under the oddest tombstones. This makes her the ideal guide for a field trip into the otherworld.

When she joined spirit researchers in the high Sierras where members of the snowbound Donner Party turned to cannibalism to survive the awful winter of 1847-48, she took great delight that the International Ghost Hunters Society set up shop at the Donner Camp Picnic Ground.

All sorts of weird facts cause Roach to bubble over in glee. Many of those alleged voices from the beyond claim that in the afterlife, fat people are thin. One dear departed is even supposed to have confided to a medium that "I can wear pleated pants now."

But discarnate beings never seem to say anything truly interesting. They never discuss what we're curious about, Roach complains, such as "Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What's it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I'm on the toilet? Would you cut that out?"

In the afterlife there seems to be no sex, if we are to believe those dispatches. If that's so, what's the purpose of all those voluptuous houris in the radical Muslim Paradise? Window dressing? All those suicide bombers who were promised an eternity of whoopee for their martyrdom must have been sold a bill of goods.

If you read this book, you'll laugh past the cemetery every Halloween for the rest of your life.

Skinback of the week

A correction from the New York Times:

An article on Nov. 13 about Sean Bedford, the Georgia Tech offensive lineman who is also an aerospace engineering major, misstated the terms that David Scarborough, a senior research engineer, used in teaching the jet and rocket propulsion class. The terms were “isentropic flow,” “stagnation states” and “adiabatic efficiency for the diffuser” — not “isotropic stagnation state” and “idiomatic deficiency for diffuser.”

That idiomatic deficiency will get you every time.

Whew

I worried in Saturday's blogpost whether the University of Illinois Press editor handling the manuscript of the upcoming second edition of What's That Pig Outdoors? would do so with a gentle and deft touch, or change stuff just for change's sake to show me who's the boss.

No need. Got the MS. back just now with this note:

"Edits were minor. Most of my edits were simply adding serial commas, italicizing Sun-Times, and correcting the stray misspelling or awkward phrase. I have one comment and six queries in the file. . . .

"I must compliment you on your writing. Your style is very readable and enjoyable. I’m also going to look for copies of your other books, as they all look interesting to me!"

Now isn't that a brilliant and discerning fellow as well as a true scholar and gentleman, and an astute student of human nature, especially the agonies of anxious writers?

His name is Tad Ringo, and I am going to buy him dinner sometime.

It begins again

"It" meaning the process of publishing a new book, an enterprise that can be rewarding, frustrating and humiliating all at once.

What's That Pig Outdoors: A Memoir of Deafness, my first book, first published away back in 1990, is being re-issued in a new and updated edition next August 1 by the University of Illinois Press.

Most of the manuscript was of course edited and set more or less in stone two decades ago, but the new, 38-page Epilogue I wrote for the second edition has yet to go under the editorial knife. That will happen during the next week or two.

Will the U. of I. editor accept my carefully crafted sentences, praising them for their shapeliness, or savagely rip apart the unholy mess I've dumped in his lap?

A lot of tender ego rides on the result.

I should not be so nervous, having spent 40 years working both sides of the editorial street as the fellow with the typewriter and the fellow with the blue pencil. If the experience taught me anything, it was that no matter how good a writer one thinks one is, a competent editor can always make him look better.

I had a brilliant editor for my first three books, all nonfiction. First at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, then at Random House and finally HarperCollins, Paul Golob actually taught me how to shape a book, how to craft a narrative, how to draw the reader into my tale.

For the three later mysteries, I was on my own, doing my own "line editing" and trusting a freelance copy editor (hired by the publisher) to tidy up the verbal dust kitties. (A smart production editor caught several stupid mistakes before they made print.)

And now I'm back in the hands of a New Guy. I'm a New Guy to him, too. We shall see.

Palin's Potemkin book tour

I'm a book-tour veteran. Let me tell you, those things were grueling. Today Minneapolis, tomorrow Corte Madera, the next day San Diego. Even when I was traveling by train -- my preference over airlines -- the going was tough, full of wrinkles and weariness and road-food gas.

But when the going gets tough, Sarah Palin gets jetting.

She's on a big bus tour, her book publicists claim, to get closer to the small-town voters who are her base. She travels the way they do, says the meme; she knows how Joe and Julie Six-pack feel, because she's one of them.

Yeah? The veteran investigative journalist and author Joe McGinniss (The Selling of the President, 1969) now gives us The Selling of Sarah Palin 2009 in an article revealing that far from traveling by bus, she flies in a $4,000 an hour private Gulfstream from place to place.

Palin then boards her bus at the airport for the short trip to a triumphant arrival at the target bookstore or lecture venue -- completely pressed and fresh, unlike her weary publisher's publicist, who looks as if she'd been dragged coast-to-coast on Greyhound. Because she was.

Palin's fans are completely in the dark.

Ah, dear Sarah, you paragon of grassroots authenticity.

Today's factlets

Three things I didn't know I needed to know until I knew them today:

1. It would be kinder to the environment if we dug up and replanted municipal Christmas trees instead of cutting them down.

2. Smoking around your Mac might void the Apple warranty because it creates a biohazard for the repair guys.

3. PC users are twice as likely as Mac users to choose USA Today for a complimentary hotel newspaper. And Mac users are 53 percent more likely than PC users to choose the New York Times.

Yossarian's Thanksgiving

The Thanksgiving dinner Joseph Heller described in Catch-22 may be the rowdiest Turkey Day in modern American fiction, and today Mark Athitakis, who was a valued reviewer of mine at the Chicago Sun-Times, quotes it on his blog. Thanks, Mark!