Even the most casual and brief visitor to my blog will note that I am not much of a non-fiction reader. But this was greeted with rapture by lots of reviewers and by a couple of people over on here. So when it popped up as a Daily Deal on Kindle, I thought “why not?” and my goodness am I ever glad I did because I LOVED it. Roach clearly has an intense fascination with the human body. She’s published books about dead bodies and copulating […]
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 […]
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
I love Mary Roach and I LOVED this book. I’ve read Stiff and Spook before, and Packing for Mars was better even than those two. This woman does it all, and I would love to just take her out for a beer sometime. Packing for Mars delves into the space industry in every way imaginable: from the first tests to see what would happen to people in zero gravity to how they eat, sleep and poop in space. Roach investigates it all, and asks the greatest questions. The writing is […]