When it comes to literature about eating, science has been a little hard to hear amid the clamor of cuisine. Just as we adorn sex with the fancy gold-leaf filigree of love, so we dress the need for sustenance in the finery of cooking and connoisseurship…Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into [...]

I've finished the book. I'm left with the feeling that lies somewhere between TMI, an author's perverse, small-boy like joy in slightly shocking the adults by talking about farts and turds, and actually being interested in the transformation from a Michelin chef plate of food into, moments later, a disgusting saliva-covered bolus no one even wants to look at. The book is punctuated with many small revelations that won't change my life in any way but are good to drop into a conversation for that [...]

This is a journey of a different kind. Sort of like an Eat, Pray, Love for the digestively curious. So I guess that would make it Belch, Gurgle, Fart?

This is a book not to devour, but to take in small bites, slowly savoring and digesting every funny phrase and interesting fact.This is only the first reviewer to use lots of bad puns. Be afraid. Be very afraidUpdate: I simply adored this book and found it to be very tasty--OK, so maybe parts were nausea inducing but for the most part it was fascinating stuff. And, please note my prediction that poop transplants are going to be the next big thing. Yup, you heard it right, "fecal transferences" a [...]

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Roach truly is the funniest, best science writer I've ever had the pleasure to read. Her inquisitive mind doesn't always follow a linear path & the side tracks are illuminating.--------------"While a seaman might survive the suction and swallow, his arrival in a sperm whale's stomach would seem to present a new set of problems."*[footnote]*I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homopho [...]

I'm considering giving up on this book even though the topic is interesting. If only Mary Roach could restrain herself from quite so much levity. The jokes, asides, and snarky personal observations come on strong. They're constant, unrelenting, (somehwhat geeky humor) and are a distraction from otherwise fascinating material.Her research is impressive and I appreciate her trying to make it not dry and clinical, but she goes overboard. Why do I care how pretty the scientists are, what they're wea [...]

WARNING: Sometimes I have the mind of a 12 year old boy. Beware of reading this review if farts and bodily functions gross you out.More like 2.5 starsMary Roach may have that mindset too. So far I've read books by her detailing what happens with dead bodies and more than you ever want to know about your Alimentary canal.I love having random facts in my head. My husband hates that fact about me. This book added in a way in which he may never be the same again. We tackle our bodies food from intak [...]

If your body features a digestive tract, consider this book a must-read.However, here are some caveats: 1) I strongly advise you not to read this book within 1 hour before or 2 hours after eating.2) I strongly advise you not to read this book in any room used for cooking or eating (such as your kitchen or dining room). Instead—even though this might not be acceptable by some etiquette books—I strongly advise you to keep this book in the bathroom and read it while sitting on the john. (Your b [...]

Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, 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.Welcome to Digestion 101 with your instructor, the lovely and talented, Mary Roach. Today's lesson is Everyone Poops! Now Get Over It!This is the truly magical, m [...]

I was driving and listening to NPR one Sunday morning and realized with glee that the author being interviewed was Mary Roach. I had read "Stiff" a few years ago and found myself drawn to her humor. When I drove past a local bookstore, I couldn't resist the urge to pull into the lot and listen as the author discussed feces transplants. Within moments, I found myself searching high and low for the new title, "Gulp". After scanning all the usual places in the store, I finally asked an associate to [...]

Did you know that the human infant enters the world without information on what is edible and what is not, and until they are around the age of two, you can get them to eat almost anything? Or that saliva could be used to pretreat food stains because of the enzymes it contains (the same enzymes are artificially manufactured for laundry detergents)? Or that one of the reasons we like crunchy foods might be because we have a destructive nature and derive pleasure from destroying things?Mary Roach [...]

You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.Oh golly gee, Mary Roach is fun! I read Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers just yesterday, (or as tells me, the summer of 2014. But that's basically yesterday.) And I really enjoyed it. 'Twas a fantastic mix of fun and science. Like Bill Nye meets Bill Schutt. Hell, throw in some Bill Murray too, why not!?Bills bills everywhere!Gulp was just what I wanted - first, [...]

If you are a fact-loving nerd looking for an excuse to talk about poop more often, then Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach is the book for you! Each section of this non-fiction book covers a different part of the alimentary canal (AKA the digestive tract), starting with sense of smell, going into the mouth, and following it all the way down to its.lusion, if you will. I have read three other books by the brilliant and awesome Mary Roach, and I was not disappointed by Gulp. I [...]

Mary Roach is an author I can always count on to deliver an amazing book. This time she tackles digestion.Did you know that holy-water enemas were performed at exorcisms?!If Jonah was really eaten by a whale, could he have survived?! What if it was a shark?!What does your pet REALLY want to eat?!What does it feel like to stick your arm into a fistulated cow's stomach?!What does it feel like to get a colonoscopy without sedation!?Is it possible to burst a human stomach?! Eat yourself to death by [...]

The science geek in me practically peed her pants she was so excited to read this book. (I guess my inner nerd has a mild case of urinary incontinence but that is neither here nor there) I mean an entire book about the alimentary canal, starting with my home turf, the mouth? Count me in!Will you enjoy this book? Well, that depends on how you answer the following questions. Have you ever wondered: If you can die from trying to defecate too forcefully?Why do animals eat their own poop?Could the Jo [...]

Not as good as Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, nor as informative. It focuses a bit too much on entertaining the reader and less on informing. It wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing but I don’t really find jokes about feces and the holes it can come out of that amusing. There were also some parts, by the end of the book in which I could feel the author trying to gross me out despite her saying at the start of this book that she will treat this subject with respect and not try to [...]

From the author of the popular "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" comes this quirky and interesting look at the human digestive tract from, literally, one end to the other. Roach again writes about a somewhat squeamish, gross-ish, yucky topic that you didn't know you were interested in until she made you realize the subject matter is interesting. Examples: 1) Did you know that most laundry detergents contain at least 3 digestive enzymes found in your saliva, to help break down food and [...]

While reading, I was reminded of long-ago biology studies, and the simplest members of Animalia that are little more than a gastric tube composed of cells. It’s astonishing, really, those primitive forms of waterborne life, and it emphasizes an interesting thing about animal anatomy, that we aren’t a solid, discrete, bounded organism: the environment moves through us as much as it moves around us. We like to think of “inside” and “outside” our bodies when in fact, it’s much more co [...]

You know what would be amazing (or potentially disastrous)? A Mary Roach/Mark Kurlansky collaboration, preferably on some obscure topic. Can you imagine? The depth, breadth, and width of their topic would be so fully explored, we'd all be experts on the subject by the end of their book.I love Roach's passion for whatever she's researching. She goes down rabbit holes and gets excited to try to tie her findings in with her main thesis, sometimes with success, usually without. Example: While resear [...]

Ahoy there me mateys! For those of ye who are new to me log, a word: though this log’s focus is on sci-fi, fantasy, and young adult, this Captain does have broader reading tastes. Occasionally I will share some novels that I enjoyed that are off the charts (a non sci-fi, fantasy, or young adult novel), as it were. So today I bring ye:gulp: adventures on the alimentary canal (Mary Roach)This book was so fascinating that I sat across from the first mate reading fact after fact out-loud to him, p [...]

When I read Packing for Mars two years ago, I was very vocal about how my favorite chapter was her detailed exploration of pooping in outer space*, so it was with much excitement that I realized her next book, Gulp (subtitled Adventures on the Alimentary Canal) was about the science of eating, digesting, and yes, excreting. Maybe you think that's gross, and if so, to you I say THIS.*Seriously, if you're not going to read the whole book, at least read that chapter. She includes a transcript where [...]

I'm a big fan of Mary Roach's books, and that said, this is her best. I'll admit straight off that this opinion is deeply influenced by the very fact of my chronic inflammatory bowel disease; for one thing, I am well beyond the squeamishness and taboos that this subject matter may induce or cross. Digestion, food's long journey through the bowel, and the composition and frequency of "release" are very conscious parts of my daily life. To read Roach approach such familiar and usually off limits s [...]

Mary Roach is no stranger to delving into topics which others find icky -- like corpses. Even her more conventional works flirt with taboo, and in Gulp she embraces disgust whole-heartedly, by treating readers with iron stomachs to a discussion of all things digestive. Gulp is not, strictly speaking, a book about the digestive system. Instead, it's a history of the odder means scientists through the centuries have fashioned to study it, though some of the questions themselves are startling enoug [...]

Gulp is Roach's 5th major non-fiction book and I think that colors a lot of its character. It feels very casual, and to a large extent Roach is simply having fun in her own way. She follows the topics that interest her, the ones that lead to some of the oddest places. That means as a reader you will be entertained (a word that has a one-off shade of meaning here), but if it changes your life in anyway, its purely accidental. You won't come away with a feeling that you now know the digestive syst [...]

Mary Roach's latest book examines what happens to food from the time we put it in our mouths to the time it comes out the other end. It contains all the elements of her trademark style - cheeky humor, a gung-ho attitude towards the disgusting, and actual quality science.There were many sections of this book I found genuinely fascinating. Her initial chapters about the elements of taste - both human and pet - got me hooked and wanting to read more, and her closing chapters about maladies of the c [...]

Fascinating bookere are a few chapters that may be hard for the faint of heart. There were a few things that turned my stomach (only a handful of pages total), but for the most part I was mesmerized by all I was learning about the Digestive Tract. How come competitive eaters stomachs don't burst? Did you know a person who has lost their sense of taste and smell could starve to death? How do prisoners sneak things like cell phones and tobacco into prison? Did you know saliva has antiseptic qualit [...]

Mary Roach has written yet another winner here. Her early books "Bonk" and "Spook" were a little flat and derivattive, but ever since then she has delivered.Yes, she chooses deliberately risque subjects and yes there is always a chapter on farts, but damn she can make things interesting. It seems she can make the fine balance of making a scientist such as myself happy, while also placating my inner 8-year-old. And really, all she is doing by telling us how artificial farts are made, and the size [...]

Entertaining science, wish she had been my chemistry teacher in High School instead of the monosyllabic Mr. Worth, who I unfortunately had. Some of this is boring for sure, but some is just fascinating, some is oh so gross, but some is interesting and humorous to boot. Did you know they actually have a poop website? Who knew. There is also a section in this book about pet food tasters for all the pet lovers out there. Amusing informative and gross how can one lose? ARC from publisher.

Mary Roach has done it again. She has created a book that I purposely read slowly so I could savor every bite, picture, and footnote*. This time she takes us on a trip down the Alimentary Canal, from nose, tongue, and teeth to the bitter end of the trail with all the explorers, characters, scientists, and even Elvis to enlighten us on our way. Roach has a way of taking you along this field trip asking all the questions that you know you wouldn't have the guts to ask, of the professionals who are [...]

Fascinating and disgusting - Roach has the corner on this market! I learned several tidbits and interesting facts although not necessarily ones to share in polite company at the dinner table!