Reviews
There is much to enjoy about Mary Roach--her infectious awe for quirky science and its nerdy adherents, her one-liners... She is beloved, and justifiably so., With the same eager curiosity that she previously brought to the subjects of cadavers, space, and sex, the author explores the digestive system, from mouth to colon., Never before has the process of eating been so very interesting.... After digesting her book, you can't help but think about what that really means., 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. 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. Yum!, A witty, roving romp of a book... Roach...is a thoroughly unflappable, utterly intrepid investigator of the icky., A witty, woving romp of a book... Roach...is a thoroughly unflappable, utterly intrepid investigator of the icky., "One of my top criteria for pronouncing a book worthwhile is the number of times you snort helplessly with laughter and say, "Wow! Did you know that ... " before your long-suffering spouse throws a book at you from across the room. My personal spouse says that, in this department, "Gulp" takes the cake.", Mary Roach put her hand in a cow's stomach for you, dear reader. If you don't read Gulp, then that was all for naught. Plus, you'll miss out on the funniest book ever written about guts., There is much to enjoy about Mary Roach--her infectious aw for quirky science and its nerdy adherents, her one-liners... She is beloved, and justifiably so., You'll come away from this well-researched book with enough weird digestive trivia to make you the most interesting guest at a certain kind of cocktail party...Go ahead and put this one in your carry-on. You won't regret it., Roach is a gift to all those unsung researchers with weird curiosities, the people who tell us things we hadn't thought to ask: The teams who reveal that we like crunchy foods that snap at speeds of 300 meters per second and produce a crunch that reaches 90 to 100 decibels; the anthropologist who swallowed a shrew whole (with a little tomato sauce) to demonstrate what remains after digestion; the scientists who put windows into cows to see into their rumen; the researchers who study spit; investigators who sniff icky things; and specialists who examine poop. When Roach talks about her visits to various laboratories, I picture her received as a celebrity, the one person who gets it, the outsider who will teach the world to appreciate the distant exurbs of human curiosity. At this she succeeds admirably., As probing as an endoscopy, Gulp is quintessential Mary Roach: supremely wide-ranging, endlessly curious, always surprising, and, yes, gut-wrenchingly funny., "Far and away her funniest and most sparkling book, bringing Ms. Roach's love of weird science to material that could not have more everyday relevance. . . . Never has Ms. Roach's affinity for the comedic and bizarre been put to better use. . . . "Gulp" is structured as a vastly entertaining pilgrimage down the digestive tract, with Ms. Roach as the wittiest, most valuable tour guide imaginable.", Letting this brilliantly mischievous writer, for whom no pun is ouch and no cow sacred, dip her pen into the font of all potty humor must have seemed even riskier than her previous excursions into corpses (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk) and outer space (Packing for Mars). But dip she did--at one point she put her whole arm into a cow's belly--and came up with another quirkily informative pop-science entertainment in Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal., [A] merry foray into the digestive sciences....Inexorably draws the reader along with peristaltic waves of history and vividly described science.
