Skip to main content

Gulp - Mary Roach ****

I have to be honest, I wasn't particularly looking forward to this book, and put off reading it for quite a while. In part this because anything vaguely medical makes me feel queasy, while as someone who suffers from a serious chronic gastrointestinal problem, Mary Roach's subtitle 'adventures on the alimentary canal' was not encouraging. As it happens, though, the experience was not all bad.

 In her usual style, Roach pulls in a lot of characters along the way, from sword swallowers to 'fartistes' (sic) including the inevitable lighting of inflammable gasses, which is where a lot of the fun in the book comes from. Her humorous writing style lacks the subtlety of a Bill Bryson - if I'm honest, I find it a trifle irritating - but a lot of people do like it, with newspaper reviews describing it as 'seriously funny' and 'laugh a minute.'

What's more you certainly will learn a lot more about a part of our bodily system that few of us (who don't suffer from GERD) give little thought to as we pile in the food, really forgetting it after the eating part of the experience, and then dispose of the, erm, detritus from the other end. So it genuinely is educational and sometimes fascinating. I particularly enjoyed, for instance, the section on being swallowed alive, where at least there was a chance to get away from the human digestive tract for a while.

 This is without doubt a good book, which is why I've given it more stars than I would on my own personal reaction. However, to get the most out of it, I think it's fair to say you need a strong stomach, which I don't have. So I'm afraid it's a book that is more likely to get flushed than to come back for a second tasting.

 Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question.  Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book
Post a Comment
Read more

Vector - Robyn Arianrhod ****

This is a remarkable book for the right audience (more on that in a moment), but one that's hard to classify. It's part history of science/maths, part popular maths and even has a smidgen of textbook about it, as it has more full-on mathematical content that a typical title for the general public usually has. What Robyn Arianrhod does in painstaking detail is to record the development of the concept of vectors, vector calculus and their big cousin tensors. These are mathematical tools that would become crucial for physics, not to mention more recently, for example, in the more exotic aspects of computing. Let's get the audience thing out of the way. Early on in the book we get a sentence beginning ‘You likely first learned integral calculus by…’ The assumption is very much that the reader already knows the basics of maths at least to A-level (level to start an undergraduate degree in a 'hard' science or maths) and has no problem with practical use of calculus. Altho
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on
Post a Comment
Read more