Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

And the writing is anything but

Stiff by Mary Roach

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Another re-read for me, this time because my workplace book club suggested it. Feelings were mixed, in part because the text and writing style were, contrary to the title, so loose. The naysayers felt like the chapters were disjointed and that the writer was too flip, looking for a joke rather than research, but for my part I think it’s well balanced. Stiff follows what happens to the human body after we die – not the experience of death, not what happens to “us,” but […]

You can die from constipation. Just ask Elvis Presley’s doctor.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

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CBR11bingo: Science If you do a Google search for “how did Elvis Presley die,” most answers will mention prescription drugs and cardiac arrest. Until I read Gulp, I hadn’t heard that the King had what’s known as a megacolon, which is exactly what it sounds like: a big-ass large intestine. According to his personal physician George Nichopoulos, the condition gave Elvis such terrible constipation that Nichopoulous had to administer laxatives and enemas on an almost daily basis. Whether the condition was the result of genetics […]

I’ll be on my way

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Many years ago, starting out a new job in a new city, a good friend and I moved into an apartment together to save on rent. On moving day, we got all the boxes indoors, dug out the necessities for the night, ate carry-out on the bare floor, and passed out for the night. Neither of us so much as got up to go to the bathroom until morning. And yet when we blearily emerged and went into the living room, we found all the […]

Where Do You Go Oh Oh Oh Oh Eh Oh

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The library’s audiobook app knows me so well that it decided to recommend to me Mary Roach’s 2004 bestseller Stiff. A book about cadavers called “Stiff” sounded awesome, almost as awesome as the others book about science and sex called Bonk. With nothing to lose except my ignorance about what happens when I die, I pressed the Check Out button and enjoyed the next eight hours of audio delight.  In the book, author Mary Roach saucily quips her way across time and the planet to understand how […]

Been thinkin a lot today; thought about the army.

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Mary Roach’s absent-minded professor tangents have never been more welcome than in this book about the science of military development. I picked this up due to my long established weakness for remaindered books and a desire for a light, unchallenging read; Roach is an expert at crafting pop science reads at their most accessible, sometimes to a fault. That said, I was nervous about the military theme as I generally don’t gravitate to media on this topic and immediately feared I was going to get […]

A delightful book to swallow whole.

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Mary Roach is a gem, truly, and a gift to the world. Every time I read a book of hers (and I’ve read all but one), “delightful” is the word that comes to mind, because her delightful personality shines through every word without ever overtaking the book. She has a very specific talent and she uses it so damn delightfully (there’s that word again) that the formula never gets old, even when it probably should. Her talent: taking a subject that is either kind of […]



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