Mary Roach

Harvard Book Store welcomes bestselling author MARY ROACH and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist DEBORAH BLUM for a discussion of Roach's latest book, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War—an exploration of the science of keeping human beings intact, awake, sane, uninfected, and uninfested in the bizarre and extreme circumstances of war.

About Grunt

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.

Praise

“A rare literary bird, a best selling science writer . . . Roach avidly and impishly infiltrates the world of military science. . . . Roach is exuberantly and imaginatively informative and irreverently funny, but she is also in awe of the accomplished and committed military people she meets.” —Booklist

“Mary Roach is one of the best in the business of science writing. . . . She takes readers on a tour of the scientists who attempt to conquer the panic, exhaustion, heat, and noise that plague modern soldiers.” —Brooklyn Magazine

“Having investigated sex, death, and preparing for space travel, New York Times best-selling Roach applies her thorough—and thoroughly entertaining—techniques to the sobering subject of keeping soldiers not just alive but alert and healthy of mind and body during warfare.” —Library Journal

“Roach...applies her tenacious reporting and quirky point of view to efforts by scientists to conquer some of the soldier’s worst enemies.” —Seattle Times