July 30th, 2008
Zak Sally, At The Pony Club | When Mickey started drinking, that’s when things got interesting.0 comments
July 23rd, 2008
Writer’s Edge Faculty Reading | The collective literary fringe new and now.0 comments
July 16th, 2008
COMIC BOOK TATTOO, Various Artists | The Portland/Tori Amos/Sandman connection revealed.0 comments
July 9th, 2008
David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle | It’s like Hamlet, but with puppies.3 comments
July 2nd, 2008
While They Slept, Kathryn Harrison | A triple murder hits close to home.1 comment
June 25th, 2008
Andre Dubus III, The Garden Of Last Days | A stripper, a big tipper and two towers.0 comments
June 18th, 2008
Sasa Stanisic, How The Soldier Repairs The Gramophone | What kids talk about when they talk about war.2 comments
June 18th, 2008
Joseph O’Neill Netherland | A new novel set in post-9/11 New York simply isn’t cricket (it’s Seinfeld).0 comments
June 11th, 2008
Betty Roberts, With Grit And By Grace | A woman on top, for all the right reasons.0 comments
June 4th, 2008
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes | Finally, some valuable intelligence on the agency that was supposed to have provided it for us.0 comments
 Sex-crazed scientists. |
[April 23rd, 2008]
Bay Area-based author Mary Roach is no stranger to topics both arcane and stomach-turning. Her fascinating 2003 book Stiff tackled the “Curious Lives of Human Cadavers”; two years later, Spook tackled the science of the afterlife. Droll yet frank, like Auntie Mame with a yen for medical journals, Roach excels at transforming dry lecture notes into giddy nuggets of improper dinner-party fodder. But her shot selection is a bit off with her latest, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (W.W. Norton, 288 pages, $24.95). Her whirlwind tour through the world of sex experiments, from tickling pig clitorises and bumping uglies in MRI machines to shadowing Taiwanese penis surgeons, is mind-boggling fun to be sure. But the subject itself: sex—and the myriad ways brave researchers have road-tested the act—is stale in a decade when Oprah already won’t shut up about her damn va-jay-jay. Roach’s gift, thus far, has been shining a light on topics nobody thought they’d ever want to know about and proving us wrong in less than 300 pages. Handing us a well-researched tome on the thing that’s already on all our minds? Well, where’s the challenge in that?
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RECENT COMMENTS ON “Mary Roach, Bonk”
Bonk has four stars on Amazon, and her book about Death has 4.5 stars. Second books are always tougher, and Sex is a tricky subject to make funny. Death is not. As books go, I'd give this one a B. ...
