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 that Gulp explores is classic
Mary Roach terrain: the questions inspired by our insides
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 names
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—or has the courage—to ask. And we go on
location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a bacteria
transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a
meal. With Roach as our insatiably curious guide, we travel
the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists (one is a
certain Dr. McNaught, who gleefully sets fire to a young
man’s belch), Eskimos (with whom Roach eats the eye of
an Arctic char) and exorcists (who have occasionally
administered holy water rectally), nuns, terrorists (who, it
turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal
bombs in their digestive tracts), scammers and schemers, and
so we learn about ourselves. Like all of Roach’s
books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is
about human bodies.
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