The funny, affable Roach focuses on military science in her fifth book and amid the chicken guns and silk underpants, she wrestles with the injustices of war
Mary Roach’s curiosity is notoriously infectious. When we first met her, she was knee-deep in a stack of dead people. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, published in 2003, took you on a tour of a body farm at the University of Tennessee, where corpses lay rotting in the grass. It showed you decapitated heads kept in roasting pans, where young plastic surgeons learned to do nose jobs on the flesh of the dead. Nary a page went by without some blood and gore.
You went along willingly nonetheless, because Roach is such a winsome presence. “A goober with a flashlight,” she calls herself. Funny but not glib, nosy but not prurient, Roach is the consummate tour guide. She would go on to walk us through outer space (Packing for Mars), digestion (Gulp), ghosts (Spook) and sex (Bonk). In Grunt, her new book, it’s military science she wants to explore. It’s not the science of killing that gentle Roach is after, though; she wants to walk us through “the quiet, esoteric battles with less considered adversaries: exhaustion, shock, bacteria, panic, ducks”.
While General [Colin] Powell is putting a Sharpie to the pages of It Worked for Me, while Guam sleeps, Gavin Kent White will be having his urethra rebuilt. Captain White, a 2011 graduate of West Post, stepped on an IED in Afghanistan. It Didn’t Work as Well for Him.
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