“Grunt” is her seventh book, including “Bonk,” “Spook” and “Gulp” (examining, respectively, sex, science’s take on the afterlife, and the digestive tract and its outputs). Roach takes their writhing to be playful exuberance before Peck notes, “They do cannibalize.” Medical maggots were FDA approved in 2007 (in case you’re wondering, they’re contained in a “cage dressing”), but there’s a reminder of “nature, red in tooth and claw” when entomologist George Peck coaxes three onto Roach’s index finger. Later, she recounts the pestilential effects on troops through history of the filth fly but its redeeming quality, in larval maggot form, as a wound cleaner - devouring decaying flesh like a minesweeper clearing a minefield. In a “windowless horror movie of a room,” Roach observes a procedure performed on two cadavers with “the potential to restore the wholeness of a young man.” “Phalloplasty” has come a long way and surgeons have developed a passable “neopenis” fashioned from “inflatable rods,” but they are prone to rupture, hence the interest in penis transplant. She’s unflinchingly ready to explicitly describe things we’re inclined to be squeamish about, and in her latest book, “Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War” - no less drenched in sordid secretions - it doesn’t take long for the going to get gory.Īt Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and nearby Johns Hopkins University, she reports from the front line of genital reconstruction surgery for injured soldiers. She answers questions not found in any other book on the military: Why is DARPA interested in ducks? How is a wedding gown like a bomb suit? Why are shrimp more dangerous to sailors than sharks? Take a tour of duty with Roach, and you’ll never see our nation’s defenders in the same way again.Mary Roach’s books come marinated in bodily fluids and infused with noxious vapors you feel like you should be wearing rubber gloves to turn the pages. Roach samples caffeinated meat, sniffs an archival sample of a World War II stink bomb, and stays up all night with the crew tending the missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee. Army Natick Labs explain why a zipper is a problem for a sniper.

Back in the US, fashion designers at U.S. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, she discovers that diarrhea can be a threat to national security. Roach visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries-panic, exhaustion, heat, flies, noise-and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them.

Grunt roach