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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.… (more)
User reviews
After I heard Mary Roach discussing GULP during a Radiolab podcast, I really wanted to read it. She was talking about the symbiotic relationship we have with bacteria that inhabit our intestines and colon, and the podcast was fascinating and disgusting and
All dashed.
GULP supposed to be about nourishment, about eating and excreting, about how important and undevalued our 'alimentary canal' is. It starts with the mouth and ends with the butt, and every chapter is a little more disgusting than the last. There's a whole chapter about fecal transplants, and if you're like me, that's a hook that will make you reach for the buy button.
I understand that this is pop science, pop non-fiction, that the purpose of a book like GULP is to entertain as well as inform. But GULP is so light it's in danger of floating away in a stiff breeze. Roach talks about sitting at a bar with this specialist, or visiting the home of that specialist, but instead of delving into the subjects those specialists understand so well, she pads the book with descriptions of the funny accent one speaks with, the video game the other's son plays. She cracks jokes about doctors with funny names (repeatedly, and it started to make me really mad -- we don't choose our names) and even describes looking at a page of Google search results. I did not buy GULP for the fascinating tale of how Mary Roach travels all around the world learning things for the book she's going to write, but I really did not buy it for the fascinating tale of how she sits at home and Googles things.
Along the same lines: she regularly cites the titles of scholarly articles she read while researching GULP and jokes about how cumbersome they can be. As often as not, she never touches on the actual content of these articles. Roach seems to have abandoned any attempt to translate that information for the reader, to make it clear and comprehensible. Instead she invites us to join her in a conspiratorial snicker at the expense of academics.
That is the exact opposite of what I want from a work of non-fiction.
There's some interesting stuff in here, buried in all the padding. But not enough. I wanted more information. I wanted Roach to delve deeper. I wanted to be satisfied, and I wasn't.
I won't be reading Mary Roach again.
Here's a list of some of the topics Roach examines from reading the scientific literature and with interviews with researchers:
- Olive oil tasting
- Pet food flavoring (and the humans who taste them)
- Organ meat consumption
- Fletcherizing
- Saliva
- Why we like chewing crunchy food
- Stomach expansion
- Competitive eating
- "Hooping" or smuggling items in the rectum
- Methane & hydrogen in flattus
- Rectal feeding
- Coprophagia
- Ritual enemas
- Megacolon and the death of Elvis
- Fecal transplants
After reading that list, you are either fascinated or disgusted. Go with that feeling when determining whether this book is right for you.
Favorite Passages:
"You will occasionally not believe me, but my aim is not to disgust....I don't want you to say 'This is gross.' I want you to say, 'I thought this might be gross, but it's really interesting.' Okay, and maybe a little gross."
The moral of the story is this: It takes an ill-advised mix of ignorance, arrogance, and profit motive to dismiss the wisdom of the human body in favor of some random notion you've hatched or heard and branded as true. By wisdom I mean the collective improvements of millions of years of evolution. The mind objects strongly to shit, but the body has no idea what we're on about.
I still think Stiffand Packing for Marsare easily Roach's best books, but this one is certainly a worthy addition to her oeuvre. I look forward (albeit with more than a little trepidation) to seeing what she turns her attention to next.
Here’s one passage, from a discussion on the colon’s drying (constipating) effect:
"Follow each call to the stool. Or, in the words of a British physician quoted in Inner Hygiene, James Whorton’s excellent and scholarly* history of constipation, 'Allow nothing short of fire or endangered life to induce you to resist...nature’s alvine call.'
*Seriously, published by Oxford University Press. But highly readable. So much so that the person who took Inner Hygiene out of the UC Berkeley library before me had read it on New Year’s Eve. I know this because she’d left behind her bookmark -- a receipt from a Pinole, California, In-N-Out Burger dated December 30, 2010 -- and because every so often as I read, I’d come upon bits of glitter. Had she brought the book along to a party, ducking into a side room to read about rectal dilators and slanted toilets as the party swirled around her? Or had she brought it to bed with her at 2 a.m., glitter falling from her hair as she read? If you know this girl, tell her I like her style."
Are you ready to take a fantastic voyage? A riveting journey from mouth to anus? Filled with humorous and informative nuggets,
If you haven’t sampled Roach’s nonfiction, here is your golden opportunity. Just eat lightly before reading.
As usual, Mary Roach tackles the surprising, taboo, and slightly disgusting aspects of human life with
Among the topics covered are: the appeal of crunchy foods, why the stomach does not digest itself, how much you can eat before your stomach bursts, and whether or not constipation actually killed Elvis. In fact, there’s a significant amount of writing dedicated to the size of Elvis’s colon, much more than I ever thought there could be on that particular subject.
In other words, this is bathroom humor at its most fascinating.
Readalikes: Breasts by Florence Williams. Another fascinating and funny look at a taboo and oft-ignored part of the human body. Both books also back up their information with very credible research.
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. Both books feature razor-sharp wit and a willingness to tackle unusual scientific topics.
A Short History of the American Stomach by Frederick Kaufman. It’s not as funny as Mary Roach’s books, but it takes an unusual approach to digestion with its connections between eating habits and national policy.
BOTTOM LINE: Interesting, gross, funny; I learned a lot. Definitely don’t listen to it at work or around your grandparents!
The cackle-out-loud moments were nicely balanced by "oh-how-interesting-never-really-considered-this" moments across a broad range of digestion- related subjects. I also feel that in some of her past books, Mary's observations of her scientist researchers could, while entertaining, be a little on the mean side, and I feel she has dialled this down a little in this book, which makes me feel less guilty at laughing at the researcher's names.
All in all a really interesting and enjoyable read that manages to remain understandable to the lay person without getting the feeling of dumbing down or being patronised.
She needs to research and write faster so I can learn more
ARC from publisher.
Gulp takes the subject of food and its ability to pass through the body while giving nourishment and pleasure to the human (and seventh grade boys a scintillating topic of conversation) and delves into the most intimate phases of digestion and excretion. She finds unique and interesting studies (both legitimately scientific and the just bizarre) and explains what was learned in a way understandable to laymen.
One thing I learned is that 90% of taste is actually smell, so the alimentary canal begins with the nose and ends with the anus (another smell!) Sorry, I couldn’t help it – that is what reading a Mary Roach book will do to you. Enjoy!
Useful and unusual word, noted as an aside about clinical words useful in general writing: periblepsis. "The wild-eyed look of delirium". This is not defined in a web search, nor in Stedman's medical dictionary, however.
The book lost something, at least for me, because of the narration by Emily Woo Zeller. Roach is cute enough on her own. Her words convey her sly, dry sense of humor just fine. The bad accents Zeller employed detracted, rather than added, to my enjoyment.
Along the way though you do learn a lot of esoterica, and some useful medical facts, too. Such as the basic tastes are sweet, bitter, salty, sour--and umami (brothy). I thought it was only the first four. Did you know that "catfish are basically swimming tongues"? That Sudanese use a condiment of fermented cow dung? That"laundry detergent is essentially a digestive tract in a box." That an effective medical treatment is to introduce useful microorganisms by transplanting them using another's feces? Roach also takes a shot at debunking food fads such as probiotic foods, gluten-free and the fetish for fiber. (Good luck on that--food myths are immortal.) Definitely a great read--just not while you're eating.
The problem
Accompanied by her usual pictures and footnotes, it is a romp that I can't resist.