Review by New York Times Review
AN Italian saliva expert named Erika Silletti recently addressed a dental conference. History doesn't record which aspects of saliva she extolled from the stage that day. Perhaps she described how art conservators are so enamored with its cleaning power they use it to dab fragile artworks. (Dishwashing detergent is a kind of simulated saliva, digesting the food you couldn't stomach.) Or maybe she praised the people of Greece - who spit on everything as a sign of good luck - for their saliva-positive attitudes. What we do know is that her speech was a bit of a disaster. The assembled dentists regarded her blankly. She returned to her hotel room and burst into tears. "They think of it as lubricating, and that's it!" she complained to her boyfriend. The Mary Roach who discovered Erika Silletti ("while roaming the abstracts of a dental conference") and makes her such a heroic figure is the Mary Roach I love. Delightful, eccentric scientists, besotted by their spheres of study, light up her pages. So does her childlike wonder for the intricacies of the human body - how it whirs along, keeping us safe for the most part. Over the years she's explored the processes of human decomposition ("Stiff"), sex ("Bonk") and the possibility of an afterlife ("Spook"). This time, with "Gulp," it's the digestive system. "Like a bite of something yummy," she promises, "you will begin at one end and make your way to the other." A clever conceit, but I wish she'd retained a little narrative mystique. Sure enough, we follow our food from the smelling, the tasting and the swallowing, inexorably downward, "via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history." The taboos have worked in her favor, she writes. "The alimentary recesses hide a lode of unusual stories, mostly unmined." Take flatulence. Flatulence could - according to an Alabama snake digestion expert named Stephen Secor - explain one of civilization's most enduring legends. A giant python eats a decomposing gazelle. It dies near a fire. A human steps on it. Hydrogen whooshes out of its mouth and catches light. Perhaps this is how the myth of the fire-breathing serpent came to be. "The oldest stories of fire-breathing dragons come from Africa and south China," Roach writes, "where the giant snakes are." There is much to enjoy about Mary Roach - her infectious awe for quirky science and its nerdy adherents, her oneliners, that giant snake hypothesis. She is beloved, and justifiably so. Which is why I feel churlish, and weirdly guilty, for not enjoying "Gulp" more. Take the frequent, and really quite juvenile, medical student gallows humor. She seems quite over the moon about a Frenchman whose stomach exploded as a result of a botched colonoscopy in 1977. For her this was an "internal Hindenburg scenario," the colonoscope was "launched from the rectum like a torpedo." Terrible deaths are scattered for amusement throughout the book. In Philadelphia's Mütter Museum, Roach sees a photograph of a man soon to die from a hugely engorged colon. He reminds her of "the bastard offspring of Humpty Dumpty and Olive Oyl. . . . The cheesecake pose invites you to stare, but everything else says, Look away." I don't want to be a sourpuss for not finding it hilarious that sometimes people's stomachs explode, but I can think of a third response alongside "stare" and "look away." It's "sympathize." At such moments, "Gulp" is a bit too much like a highfalutin Ripley's Believe It or Not! for my liking - a lot of digestive system trivia but not much heart. BUT Roach did sideswipe me with an enthralling chapter on "the alimentary canal as criminal accomplice." At a California prison she learns of an inmate who managed to get two boxes of staples, a pencil sharpener, sharpener blades and three jumbo binder rings up his "prison wallet" - jailhouse slang for rectum. His prison nickname became O.D., for Office Depot. She investigates how much damage a terrorist might do if he decided to swallow explosives - or have them surgically implanted - before getting on a plane (something Osama bin Laden apparently considered, according to documents found in his compound). The answer: almost no damage at all. Even a rectal bomb would do no more than blow the seat apart. All this is vintage Roach, as charmingly curious as the lab-nerds she eulogizes so affectionately. But the main problem with "Gulp" is that in contrast with death and its aftermath - or sex, unfortunately, for many - we are already very closely acquainted with our digestive systems. There's the disappointing sense that for every promised "unusual story" we get a lot of stuff we already know or will just find quite unremarkable. I don't need to be told that the human tooth has an awesome ability to detect the tiniest grain of sand. It's no surprise to learn that when we sense an assault by some alien invader, like vinegar, we instantly deploy our saliva foot soldiers to dilute and disempower the acid. We live with our saliva and our flatulence and our gastric juices every day. Especially gastric juices, in my case. I am a chronic reflux sufferer. It is forever bubbling upward when it should bubble downward. I ought to have torn through the chapters relating to stomach acids. But what do I get? Roach asks someone to dab some hydrochloric acid on her hand so she can "experience gastric acid." Nothing much happens. After a few minutes there's a mild itch, which then fades. Then we learn that mealworms don't dissolve in the stomach because they're protected by an exoskeleton. This is all perfectly fine, but doesn't live long in the imagination. And I really could have done without her opening chapter - a day at an olive oil tasting center. It's so uneventful her usually enchanting asides feel strained to the breaking point: "I was right there with the numb-nose who wrote, on his answer form, 'Oh, for a piece of good bread!'" she remarks. Her take-away, by the way, is: "Proficiency builds with exposure and practice." On occasions like this I'm afraid I found myself wondering how many more pages until I reached the colon and the excrement. Jon Ronson is the author of "The Psychopath Test" and, most recently, "Lost at Sea."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 5, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In her latest rollicking foray into taboo, icky, and underappreciated aspects of the human body, best-selling science writer Roach takes readers on a wild ride down the alimentary canal. Not that the author of Stiff (2003), Bonk (2008), and Packing for Mars (2010) ever takes a direct route anywhere. No, voraciously curious and intrepid Roach zips off in whatever direction her ardor for research and irrepressible instinct for the wonderfully weird lead her. She begins this hilarious, mind-expanding inquiry into eating, digestion, and elimination with the symbiosis between smell and taste, guided by an olfactorily gifted sensory analyst, then profiles Horace Fletcher, proponent of a rigorous chewing routine known as Fletcherizing practiced by Henry James and Franz Kafka. We learn more than one can imagine about saliva and our passion for crispy and crunchy foods. Given Roach's fascination with what we find disgusting, scientific obsessions and bizarre experiments, and horrifying things we do to ourselves, the stories get stranger as she proceeds down the body. Roach interviews a prison inmate about rectal smuggling (including cell phones), tells tales of flatulence, and reveals the truth about Elvis Presley's fatal megacolon. For all her irreverence, Roach marvels over the fine-tuned workings and wisdom of the human body, and readers will delight in her exuberant energy, audacity, and wit.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Roach (Stiff) once again goes boldly into the fields of strange science. In the case of her newest, some may hesitate to follow-it's about the human digestive system, and it's as gross as one might expect. But it's also enthralling. From mouth to gut to butt, Roach is unflinching as she charts every crevice and quirk of the alimentary canal-a voyage she cheerily likens to "a cruise along the Rhine." En route, she comments on everything from the microbial wisdom of ancient China, to the tactics employed by prisoners when smuggling contraband in their alimentary "vaults," the surprising success rate of fecal transplants, how conducting a colonoscopy is a little like "playing an accordion," and a perhaps too-good-to-be-true tale in the New York Times in 1896 of a real-life Jonah surviving a 36-hour stint in the belly of a sperm whale. Roach's approach is grounded in science, but the virtuosic author rarely resists a pun, and it's clear she revels in giving readers a thrill-even if it is a queasy one. Adventurous kids and doctors alike will appreciate this fascinating and sometimes ghastly tour of the gastrointestinal system. 18 illus. Agent: Jay Mandel, WME Entertainment. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Roach (Stiff; Bonk; Spook) here explores the interesting-and sometimes gross-alimentary canal. As in her other books, Roach successfully explains a complex subject in an understandable and interesting manner. The book provides an overview of the digestive canal and tackles unusual questions and taboos associated with it, taking the listener on a whirlwind tour of the human digestive system with stops including a pet food taste-test lab and a visit to an inmate in a high-profile prison. Narrator Emily Woo Zeller does a decent job with her well-paced narration but tends to overemphasize foreign accents and names. VERDICT Recommended for fans of Roach and those who enjoy reading about science. ["Filled with witty asides, humorous anecdotes, and bizarre facts, this book will entertain readers, challenge their cultural taboos, and simultaneously teach them new lessons in digestive biology," read the starred review of the New York Times best-selling Norton hc, LJ 3/1/13.-Ed.]-Saori W. Herman, Southern California Coll. of Optometry Lib., Fullerton (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Throughout her sojourn down the gastrointestinal tract, science writer Roach (Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, 2011, etc.) enlists her abundant assets of intelligence and humor while dissecting this messy and astounding part of the human body. The author ties her curiosity about this region of the body and what many consider a disgusting or off-limits subject for polite conversation to a fifth-grade classroom encounter with a headless, limbless, molded-plastic torso: "Function was not hinted at in Mrs. Claflin's educational torso man.Yet I owe the guy a debt of thanks. To venture beyond the abdominal wall, even a plastic one, was to pull back the curtain on life itself." The author begins by detailing the subtle, complex role the nose plays in taste; why humans have trouble finding names for flavors and smells; and how the human nose can be thought of as a "fleshly gas chromatograph." Roach chronicles her visit to an oral processing lab and her interview with a prisoner who patiently explained the intimate details of utilizing the alimentary canal for illegal purposes. The author grapples with the history of flatulence and adeptly describes the torment caused by Elvis Presley's megacolon, which ultimately caused his demise. She also fleshes out just what constitutes the "ick factor" in this tale of ingestion, digestion and elimination. Roach's abundant footnotes serve as entertaining detours throughout this edifying excursion. When a topic heads toward sketchy territory, the author politely provides a heads-up for squeamish readers. Whether Roach is writing about lateral tongue protrusion, the taboo surrounding saliva or whether "rectal consumption of beef broth breaks one's Lenten fast," the author entertains with this incredible journey into the netherworld of the human body. A touchy topic illuminated with wit and rigor, packed with all the stinky details.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
