And she conveys it all with a perfect touch: warm, lucid, wry, sharing the unavoidable amusement without ever resorting to the cheap or the obvious. Once again Roach boldly goes where no author has gone before, into the sciences of the taboo, the macabre, the icky, and the just plain weird. For all her irreverence, Roach marvels over the fine-tuned workings and wisdom of the human body, and readers will delight in her exuberant energy, audacity, and wit.įans of lively writing will be delighted by the newest monosyllable from Mary Roach. Roach interviews a prison inmate about rectal smuggling (including cell phones), tells tales of flatulence, and reveals the truth about Elvis Presleys fatal megacolon.

Given Roachs fascination with what we find disgusting, scientific obsessions and bizarre experiments, and horrifying things we do to ourselves, the stories get stranger as she proceeds down the body. We learn more than one can imagine about saliva and our passion for crispy and crunchy foods. She begins this hilarious, mind-expanding inquiry into eating, digestion, and elimination with the symbiosis between smell and taste, guided by an olfactorily gifted sensory analyst, then profiles Horace Fletcher, proponent of a rigorous chewing routine known as Fletcherizing practiced by Henry James and Franz Kafka. No, voraciously curious and intrepid Roach zips off in whatever direction her ardor for research and irrepressible instinct for the wonderfully weird lead her. Not that the author of Stiff (2003), Bonk (2008), and Packing for Mars (2010) ever takes a direct route anywhere. In her latest rollicking foray into taboo, icky, and underappreciated aspects of the human body, best-selling science writer Roach takes readers on a wild ride down the alimentary canal.

Like all of Roach's books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies. How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Why doesn't the stomach digest itself? Can wine tasters really tell a $10 bottle from a $100 bottle? Why is crunchy food so appealing? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? We go on location to a pet food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal. In Gulp we meet the scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks -or has the courage -to ask. The alimentary canal - the much-maligned tube from mouth to rear - is as taboo, in its way, as the cadavers in Stiff, and as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars.

Stiff and bonk author