The topic is interesting, but I found the book bizarrely boring. ( )

This audio book was kinda interesting and even enlightening at some points. But then she got to talking about motion sickness. I stuck with it through her ride on the parabolic jet, but sometime in disk 3 the discussion turned to vomit.

...And more Vomit. Skip a few tracks. Vomit. Skip. Vomit. Skip. Skip. Vomit. ....And I myself am feeling nauseated at the realization that vomit talk continues for an entire disk and then some.

Finally into disk five, something new! ....A masturbating chimp named Enus. Skip....Enus the Penis. Skip. Skip. ....A dead chimp, placed into one of those chambers where bugs eat all the flesh off a corpse.

Ski...never mind. I'm done. I'll just go back to thinking of space exploration as magic. There is less vomit that way. ( )

This was the year of Mary Roach for me: I had always been hesitant about her books - Bonk seemed to flippant, Stiff irreverant and she was altogether too popular - always a sign that a pop science author doesn't know what she or he is talking about.

So I picked up Packing for Mars because one of my friends was insistent that Mary Roach was actually a great author, and by the title it seemed the least likely to offend, and, to be perfectly honest, there needs to be a new law of physics to describe the force that over time pulls me in to any book on astronomy.

To say I was pleasantly surprised is an understatement. Roach is clearly a scientific writer, rather than a scientist, which is a niche in need of more authors: she writes with a fluidity that is lacking in some popular science books written by scientists, but more than that, she functions in this odd way as an audience surrogate - bringing with her the curiosity (sometimes scatological) of her readers and commenting along the way about her anticipation for meetings, her rationale for her questions and a description of how she finds out the information that she shares. It is a unique authorial voice and one that I enjoyed thoroughly.
The content itself is a complete exploration into the NASA space program - short on hoopla and long on (sometimes scatological) details. Roach is complete, explaining, for instance, every type of food tried, the nutritional assessments, texture and composition of astronaut food, followed up by how it is actually eaten, including concerns about the ability to swallow in space, and which were substantiated and which were not.

Yes, she is a little long on the scatology, but I think that bothers me more than it does the average reader. And while there is a heavy dose of humor, it is mostly witty and tongue-in-cheek, more than gross-out humor. I've been converted: Long live Mary Roach! ( )

This is one of my new favorite books. I checked it out from the library, but might have to go buy it so I can enjoy rereading it at my leisure. ( )

This book taught me the words egest and steatorrhea, and that the most breathtaking sight in space might actually be the view of your own urine, flash-frozen and shimmering in the sun’s rays. Mary Roach explains how the surreal physical and physiological challenges of space travel go beyond the obvious. From bizarre research to behind-the-scenes shenanigans to why we can’t drink a Coke in space, I’ve learned, in the most hilarious way possible, that space travel isn’t necessarily as glamorous as I had once thought. Packing for Mars is, dare I say, out of this world. ( )