This is my favorite of the Mary Roach books that I've read. I love how well-researched and wide-reaching she is in her books. I love learning about space and it was great to read about how much effort and thought is involved with putting live beings (mostly people) in space for a long period of...
I loved this book, dog-eared the hell out of it and posted quotes on Facebook. I was excited over every footnote, pun, absurdity and curiosity that Mary shared and would take great pleasure in going through her initial drafts, notes, and bits of research that led her to this enlightening and ente...
I can't believe this is the same woman who wrote Packing for Mars, which I enjoyed so much. I'm going to blame it on the Reader's Digest 500 word limitation.A few well-said lines of humor could not make up for the banality of the stories. The length of each essay didn't permit any insight or ev...
Mary Roach put together a great collection of science writing, including essays by writers including Oliver Sacks, Jonathan Franzen, and Malcolm Gladwell. Sacks' essay was one of my favorite-- not surprising because I love him. His essay is about face blindness, a condition he apparently suffers ...
Never have my Western morals, pre-conceptions and beliefs been more challenged than when reading Stiff. No one wants to consider their own mortality and make any arrangements for the afterlives of their bodies. Being confronted with the cold hard reality of nature, science and history of death wa...
Maybe a 3.5, but I'll round up because I laughed out loud several times and I'm hard pressed to do more than a smirk when I find something I'm reading funny.If you've never read a Mary Roach book before, her work is like this: she researches a bunch of scientific studies about a particular subjec...
