Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Couverture
W. W. Norton & Company, 2014 - 352 pages
The irresistible, ever-curious, and always best-selling Mary Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm we carry around inside.

“America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? In Gulp we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of—or has the courage to ask. We go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal. With Roach at our side, we travel the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists, Eskimos and exorcists (who have occasionally administered holy water rectally), rabbis and terrorists—who, it turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal bombs in their digestive tracts.

Like all of Roach’s books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies.

 

Table des matières

Introduction
13
Tasting has little to do with taste
23
Yourpet is not likeyou
41
Why we eat what we eat and despise the rest
61
Can thorough chewing lower the national debt?
79
The acid relationship of William Beaumont andAlexis St Martin
93
Someone ought to bottle the stuff
107
Life at the oralprocessing lab
131
Can the eaten eat back?
167
The science ofeatingyourselfto death
185
Fun with hydrogen
223
Does noxiousflatus do more
243
Is the digestive tract
269
and other ruminations on death by constipation
289
We can cureyou but theres
311
Acknowledgments
329

How to survive being swallowed alive
149

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À propos de l'auteur (2014)

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.

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