Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Look, I’m not a squeamish person, and the fact that this is a book about the human digestive system should serve as fair warning about the material, but even I found some of these essays too “icky” to read. I also have a very hard time reading about cruelty to animals, and there’s a lot of recounting of historical medical experiments here. All that’s to say that while I find Roach’s writing style incredibly entertaining, I had to skim over a lot of this. I know how popular she is, and this is the first book I’ve read by her, so I think I’ll give her a second chance with some different subject matter.

This was an excellent read, a summary I'm starting to think will apply to Mary Roach's books more and more as I work through her bibliography. :)

With each new book by Mary Roach, I hope that I will find it as captivating as her first, Stiff (that's the one about dead bodies). All her books are wonderful, but Stiff was really special.

I think I might feel about Gulp the way I feel about Stiff. It's really special. I can't wait to read it again.

If "Gulp" is any indicator, author Mary Roach clearly has an uncanny ability to make mundane subject matter entertaining.

Fascinating book! From what we eat to where it goes and all the details in between (and I do mean all the details), the alimentary canal is fascinating. Did you know beef lung has more vitamin C than a tangerine? Or what really killed Elvis? And I learned more than I ever expected to know about methods for smuggling items into prisons. I got the Audible edition and it's very well read with an extremely charismatic narrator. Highly recommended unless you're extremely squeamish about, well, the messy details of life.

Funny & fascinating!