In her remarkable debut,
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach explored what happens to the body after death, and in the process brought the corpse to glittering life. In her follow up, she stakes out similar terrain. What happens to the soul after death? And how can you tell? This time her subject is more elusive. Still, though Roach may not arrive at clear answers, she is such a consistently fascinating and entertaining writer, hard facts are decidedly beside the point.