In the thirteen years since she released her first book, Stiff — which explained how scientists have used cadavers to advance human understand of the body…and plastic surgery — writer Mary Roach has applied her patented mix of intellectual curiosity and situational humor to explain how scientists study such topics as sex (2008’s Bonk: The Curious Coupling Of Science And Sex), eating (2013’s Gulp: Adventures On The Alimentary Canal), and what waits for us after we die (2005’s Spook: Science Tackles The Afterlife) in a way that makes these science books as entertaining as they are educational. But like her 2010 tome Packing For Mars: The Curious Science Of Life In The Void — which took a different approach, and looked at how scientists were figuring out how to help astronauts survive their trips to the cosmos — her new book Grunt: The Curious Science Of Humans At War (paperback, hardcover, digital) is also more about what scientists do than how they study a certain topic.
