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Summary
Summary
A New York Times / National Bestseller
"America's funniest science writer" (Washington Post) Mary Roach explores the science of keeping human beings intact, awake, sane, uninfected, and uninfested in the bizarre and extreme circumstances of war.
Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries--panic, exhaustion, heat, noise--and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, we learn how diarrhea can be a threat to national security. 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. 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.
Author Notes
Mary Roach was born and raised in Etna, New Hampshire. She has a BA degree in psychology from Wesleyan University. She spent a few years as a free-lance copy editor before she landed a job at the San Francisco Zoological Society turning out press releases. She then moved on to write humor pieces for such periodicals as The New York Times Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle and Sports Illustrated. Her article "How to Win at Germ Warfare" was a National Magazine Award Finalist, in 1995. In 1996, her article on earthquake-proof bamboo houses took the Engineering Journalism Award. She published several books such as Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003) and Packing for Mars (2010).
Mary's title Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, made the New York Times Bestseller list in 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
New York Review of Books Review
Whether you classify her as an investigative humorist or a funny reporter, Mary Roach is an author with a formula: She tackles a subject that, to many a layperson, is forbiddingly icky (to use the clinical term), conducts loads of research and interviews, and then relates her findings in a series of conversational, disarming dispatches that don't read like typical, stock-serious science writing. This formula, complemented by an equally formulaic approach to titling, has served her well in such entertaining books as "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers," "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex" and "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal." With the American military entangled in seemingly unending missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, it's an apposite time for Roach to apply her template to, as the subtitle of "Grunt" puts it, the curious science of humans at war: the ever greater number of measures taken and experiments conducted in the cause of keeping our troops comfortable, alive, and physically and mentally well - both in the field and back home. As in previous installments of the Roach canon, "Grunt" revels in fixing our readerly gaze upon sights that we would otherwise be inclined to turn away from: Special-Ops guys struggling with diarrhea while on dangerous patrols (a serious issue that military scientists are working to alleviate); a Walter Reed doctor keen to deploy live, hungry "medical maggots" to hygienically clean out soldiers' wounds; returning vets who have lost their genitals to enemy fire or I.E.D.s and have been wheeled into operating rooms for phalloplasty, which Roach describes as "a penis reconstruction made from a cannoli roll of their own forearm skin implanted with saline-inflatable rods." Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with writing about the wages of war with irreverence and gallows humor, as such authors as Ben Fountain, in his novel "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk," and Phil Klay, in his story collection "Redeployment," have demonstrated. The big, frustrating problem with "Grunt" is not that Roach is insufficiently respectful of the brave young men and women who serve our country. Rather, it's that, too often, she is insufficiently respectful of her own material, showing a greater interest in racing to her next zinger than in exploring more deeply the implications of the subjects she is writing about. The bit above about phalloplasty? Here's what follows: "The resulting ?neopenis' is impressively natural looking," she writes. The photographs on the surgeon's phone "could be mistaken for Anthony Weiner-style selfies." And in one of the book's many discursive, David Foster Wallace-lite footnotes, an Air Force scientist discusses a notion that he considered and then abandoned, to spray enemy positions with a chemical aphrodisiac that would instill in the bad guys a fear that "their buddy is going to come in their foxhole and make fond advances." To which Roach adds, with a nightclub leer, "And come in their foxhole." C'mon, really? THERE'S TOO MUCH juvenile snickering of this sort in "Grunt." Wisecracks are a given in a Mary Roach book, but this is the first Mary Roach book in which the ratio of quip-page to reportage has gotten out of whack. Which is a shame, because the topics she has chosen to explore are worthy of more considered contemplation. The therapeutic value of sexual rehabilitation, for example, is only just beginning to be grasped by the military brass. When Roach asks a Walter Reed nurse manager named Christine DesLauriers what the divorce rate is for returning soldiers who have suffered genital loss or damage, the reply is brutal: "Divorce rate? How about suicide rate. And what a shame to lose them after they've made it back. We keep them alive, but we don't teach them how to live." Yet DesLauriers quickly vanishes from "Grunt" after a few pages, just when you're wanting to hear more about how she and her colleagues, confronted with limited resources and squeamish higher-ups, are facing up to this challenge. In her introduction, Roach offers a sort of pre-emptive apologia for her glib approach, asserting that she is not a "spotlight operator," here to take on big, obvious issues like post-traumatic stress disorder, but is, rather, "the goober with a flashlight, stumbling into corners and crannies, not looking for anything specific but knowing when I've found it." It sounds fun if you put it that way, but in practice, "Grunt" is a slapdash book, with no coherent organizing principle beyond its subtitle. In one stretch, it zooms unpredictably from the diarrhea chapter to the maggot chapter to chapters on the government's continuing development of nonlethal stink bombs designed to disperse violent mobs (Roach visits a defense contractor that created a repugnant, effective mixture called Stench Soup); the Navy's World War II-era efforts to develop shark repellent for the Pacific theater; and the methods by which sailors train for submarine escapes. There are bite-size moments of insight to be found in "Grunt" - the shark-repellent chapter reveals that, contrary to popular belief, sharks are not innately drawn to the scent of human blood, though, alarmingly, polar bears are drawn to the scent of menstruating women - but Roach, for all her enterprise in visiting military labs and bases from New England to Djibouti, is mostly content to hang around each locale only long enough to paint a small picture and crack a few jokes. Perhaps it's time to rethink the formula Roach has a proven gift for connecting with readers who are not normally into science, through levity and accessible, cleareyed prose - neither of which precludes her from doing weightier work. Maybe she should double down on a sustained, single-topic narrative next time, and stop playing the goober. DAVID KAMP is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.
Choice Review
Roach, an accomplished author, has tapped into the expertise of hundreds of scientists, researchers, engineers, nurses, doctors, soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen to gather and distill the fascinating efforts these individuals (and many others) are making to support and enhance the abilities of our military personnel. Although this book is presented as an examination of these many efforts, it is also about the highly motivated and extremely talented people who make these efforts tangible and real, people such as Nicole Brockhoff (Army Research Laboratory), who works on improving defenses against improvised explosive devices (IEDs), Christine DesLauriers, a nurse at Walter Reed Medical Center who cares for those who have lost limbs, and US Navy Chief Alan Hough, Navy Damage Controlman, who trains sailors to keep their ships and submarines afloat. Faced every day with extreme heat, exhaustion, noise, fatigue, stress, IEDs, and many other challenges, soldiers, sailors, and Marines depend on behind-the-scenes efforts to keep them functioning and successful. From Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti to Camp Pendleton in California, there is a constant and unending effort to keep our military intact, awake, sane, uninfected, and operationally effective. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Michael W. Carr, US Army Watercraft & Riverine Operations
Library Journal Review
Roach's (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers) latest exploration of the science behind ordinary things is an insightful look into the lives of soldiers-not the stories in the news but untold tales, such as how people on submarines sleep. This book covers a variety of questions that follow the author's curiosity: for example, how prevalent is food poisoning and diarrhea among special ops soldiers? How do you make and test clothing that resists rain but is breathable enough in 100-degree heat? How do medics learn the scent of a punctured intestine? Though these topics seem wide-ranging, Roach strings them together in a cohesive narrative that is delightful and quick. The only part that is at all out of place is the chapter on shark repellant, which, although interesting, seems unnecessary. Those who listened to the 99% Invisible podcast will recognize some characters from episode 191, "The Worst Smell in the World." VERDICT A must-read for fans of Roach and for those who relish learning about the secret histories of everyday things.-Cate Hirschbiel, Iwasaki Lib., Emerson Coll., Boston © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.