This is my favorite of the Mary Roach books that I've read. I love how well-researched and wide-reaching she is in her books. I love learning about space and it was great to read about how much effort and thought is involved with putting live beings (mostly people) in space for a long period of...
I loved this book, dog-eared the hell out of it and posted quotes on Facebook. I was excited over every footnote, pun, absurdity and curiosity that Mary shared and would take great pleasure in going through her initial drafts, notes, and bits of research that led her to this enlightening and ente...
I can't believe this is the same woman who wrote Packing for Mars, which I enjoyed so much. I'm going to blame it on the Reader's Digest 500 word limitation.A few well-said lines of humor could not make up for the banality of the stories. The length of each essay didn't permit any insight or ev...
Mary Roach put together a great collection of science writing, including essays by writers including Oliver Sacks, Jonathan Franzen, and Malcolm Gladwell. Sacks' essay was one of my favorite-- not surprising because I love him. His essay is about face blindness, a condition he apparently suffers ...
Never have my Western morals, pre-conceptions and beliefs been more challenged than when reading Stiff. No one wants to consider their own mortality and make any arrangements for the afterlives of their bodies. Being confronted with the cold hard reality of nature, science and history of death wa...
Maybe a 3.5, but I'll round up because I laughed out loud several times and I'm hard pressed to do more than a smirk when I find something I'm reading funny.If you've never read a Mary Roach book before, her work is like this: she researches a bunch of scientific studies about a particular subjec...
This book might be best described as the logical sequel to Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. After probing autopsies, the funeral home business, and the implications of human composting, it seems only natural that the author would turn her attention to the afterlife. To learn wh...
In this book, the best-selling author of 'Stiff' and 'Six Feet Over' sets her outrageous and insightful gaze on the most alluring scientific subject of them all: sex.
An iMac streams a Pat Metheny version of an Ennio Morricone tune while Dr. Jacopo Annese, sitting in front of his ventilated biosafety cabinet, a small paintbrush in his hand, teases apart a crumpled slice of brain. The slice floats in saline solution in a shallow black plastic tray, and at first...
Norton & Company Ltd. 2003First published in Great Britain by Viking 2003Copyright © Mary Roach, 2003The moral right of the author has been assertedIn several instances, names have been changed to respect privacy Photo credits: title page: Hulton Deutsch Collection/Corbis; p.17: Getty Images/...