UNITED STATES AUTHOR · POPULAR WORKS · SCIENCE
Mary Roach
Mary Roach is an American author, specializing in popular science and humor. Roach is noted for her curiosity and humor in addition to her research. Her many humor-laced articles in various publications over the decades include her monthly humor column, "My Planet", in Reader's Digest. Although Roach writes primarily about science, she never intended to make it her career. Roach stated in an interview with TheVerge.com when asked what exactly got her hooked on writing about science, "To be honest, it turned out that science stories were always, consistently, the most interesting stories I was assigned to cover. TV and radio shows have repeatedly asked Roach to appear as a guest so they could hear her opinions. She has appeared on programs like Coast to Coast AM, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report. Source: Wikipedia
HE WAS THE FOURTH APPLICANT TAMARA and I interviewed for the field operative's job.
— from Spook
Most acclaimed
Packing for Mars
Space is devoid of the stuff humans need to live: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh veg, privacy, beer. How much can a person give up? What happens when you can't walk for a year? Is sex any fun in zero gravity? As Mary Roach discovers, it's possible to explore space without ever leaving Earth. From the space shuttle training toilet to a 17,000-mile-per-hour crash test of NASA's space capsule, she takes us on a surreally entertaining trip into the science of living in space.
Gulp
The irresistible, ever-curious, and always best-selling Mary Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm we carry around inside. “America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp 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 words 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 of―or has the courage to ask. 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. With Roach at our side, we travel the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists, Eskimos and exorcists (who have occasionally administered holy water rectally), rabbis and terrorists―who, it turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal bombs in their digestive tracts. Like all of Roach’s books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies.
Grunt
Perhaps the single most ambitious, inexplicable project in a career fraught with ambitious inexplicability: a book/CD documenting a simple day in the simple lives of the simple pigs of Snouto Domoinko de Silo. Intoned in the original Pig Latin, with antiphonal responsari and commentaria by the lesser barnyard animals. (Maybe you had to be there.) Sooee generis. - Publisher.