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Original Essays | April 18, 2013
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More copies of this ISBNThis title in other editionsGulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canalby Mary Roach
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:"America’s funniest science writer" (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal that Gulp explores is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions inspired by our insides are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find names for flavors and smells? Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? In Gulp we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks — or has the courage — to ask. And we go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a bacteria transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal. With Roach as our insatiably curious guide, we travel the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists (one is a certain Dr. McNaught, who gleefully sets fire to a young man’s belch), Eskimos (with whom Roach eats the eye of an Arctic char) and exorcists (who have occasionally administered holy water rectally), nuns, terrorists (who, it turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal bombs in their digestive tracts), scammers and schemers, and so we learn about ourselves.
Like all of Roach’s books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies. Review:"Fans of lively writing will be delighted by the newest monosyllable from Mary Roach. 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!" Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature
Review:"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 nought. Plus, you'll miss out on the funniest book ever written about guts." Carl Zimmer, author of Evolution: Making Sense of Life and Parasite Rex
Review:"As probing as an endoscopy, Gulp is quintessential Mary Roach: supremely wide-ranging, endlessly curious, always surprising, and, yes, gut-wrenchingly funny." Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
Synopsis:The irresistible, ever-curious, and always best-selling Mary Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm we carry around inside.
VideoAbout the AuthorMary Roach is the author of four previous books: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Her writing has appeared in Outside, Wired, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. She lives in Oakland, California.
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