But, her trip to the dog food tasting facility, or her conversations with the bean tasters were hilarious. You won't want to listen around meal time, and her in-depth (npi) look at the *prison wallet* might have you skipping ahead. Some of the subject matter was a tad gross-even more so than Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (which I thought was a little better), butt that is part of the tour. And there's only one way out of the alimentary canal. Like Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage - Gulp is a little like boarding a tour bus and being swallowed instead of injected into the human body Roach is the tour guide/comedian that narrates the trip with an entertaining story, or bizarre fact at every stopping point on the way out. Gulp is like her other one-syllable titled books (Stiff, Bonk, Spook), nothing is sacred, and nothing is off limits.including laughing while you learn. One minute she is seriously discussing biology with academicians, the next she is telling the reader to blame those particularly malodorous *floaters* (flatulence) on the dog. No, she's not a scientist, and this isn't research to reference on a term paper.but her humorous approach, irreverent wit, and ability to hunt down the most bizarre facts, combine to make any subject she tackles so entertaining and interesting you'll devour every word. If Mary Roach taught science, all the kids would earn A's. Like all of Roach’s books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies. With Roach as our guide, 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. 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 scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of - or has the courage to ask. 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? 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. Roach takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. Best-selling author Mary Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm we carry around inside.

Gulp by mary roach