Grunt, Mary Roach
Grunt, Mary Roach
7 Rating(s)
List: $35.99 | Sale: $25.20
Club: $17.99

Grunt
The Curious Science of Humans at War

Author: Mary Roach

Narrator: Abby Elvidge

Unabridged: 8 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/07/2016


Synopsis

Bestselling author 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.

About Mary Roach

Journalist and former Salon.com columnist Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestseller Stiff, Spook, Bonk, and Packing for Mars. She has written for a number of publications, including Outside, Discover, New Scientist, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine. She has earned a number of awards for her work, including the Harvard Secular Society's Rushdie Award, which is their award for outstanding lifetime achievement in cultural humanism. A popular TED speaker, Mary lives in Oakland, California.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Will on July 24, 2024

The Chicken gun has a sixty foot barrel, putting it solidly in the class of an artillery piece. While a four pound chicken hurtling in excess of 400 miles per hour is a lethal projectile…OK, stop right there. Mary Roach’s latest venture into odd science begins with a notion that would likely rai......more

Goodreads review by Mario the lone bookwolf on November 06, 2021

As the saying goes, war is the father of all things and human ingenuity, progress, technological development, and higher civilization. If humans would be as peaceful as bonobos, we might be happy, but probably much more primitive and less highly technologically developed. Before something can be app......more

Goodreads review by Brett on May 18, 2016

Having served in the Marines (the entire time in an infantry battalion no less), reading about military gear and health research had me chuckling more than a dozen times, only because of having spent many nights in the rain, or the snow, or a desert, or a jungle, dealing with crap gear, tasteless fo......more

Goodreads review by Carmen on August 30, 2017

Someone else yells, "Blood sweeps!" A corpsman trainee reaches under my back and slides both hands from shoulders to hips. He looks at his hands, checking for blood, for a wound that might have been overlooked. If you don't happen to be wounded, blood sweeps feel lovely. Mary Roach. What can I say. O......more