Gulp by Mary Roach

Mary Roach never disappoints. This particular foray into science focus on the alimentary canal: how it works, why it works and everything else we know about it.
As usual, Mary isn’t afraid to investigate everything from what your saliva does to how/why gas smells (including going to a laboratory that studies exactly that) to fecal transplants to cure colitis. She speaks to Elvis’s personal doctor. She gets stomach acid dropped on her arm (makes you itchy, apparently). She speaks with scientists who study food textures and pet-food flavors. She interviews a prison inmate about smuggling phones in his rectum, aka, a “prison wallet”. She seems to have a natural knack for seeking out people who are wildly enthusiastic about their work, even if their work focuses on frog stomachs.
Her writing is fun and fast. She asks important questions, like “How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies?”. She shares interesting facts, like “Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fish they’ve caught for their young.”. And her observations cannot be ignored: “The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.”
In short, the book was awesome, I had a blast reading it, and I want to be Mary Roach’s best friend because she seems like one of the most genuinely interesting people on the planet.