Other Sellers on Amazon
92% positive over last 12 months

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.


Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal Paperback – April 1, 2014
There is a newer edition of this item:
Enhance your purchase
The irresistible, ever-curious, and always best-selling Mary Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm we carry around inside.
“America’s funniest science writer” (Washington Post) takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: the questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? In Gulp we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of―or has the courage to ask. We go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal. With Roach at our side, we travel the world, meeting murderers and mad scientists, Eskimos and exorcists (who have occasionally administered holy water rectally), rabbis and terrorists―who, it turns out, for practical reasons do not conceal bombs in their digestive tracts.Like all of Roach’s books, Gulp is as much about human beings as it is about human bodies.
15 illustrations- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Publication dateApril 1, 2014
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
- ISBN-100393348741
- ISBN-13978-0393348743
- Lexile measure1100L
Frequently bought together
- +
- +
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
― Jon Ronson, New York Times Book Review
"As engrossing as it is gross."
― Entertainment Weekly
"Far and away her funniest and most sparkling book, bringing Ms. Roach’s love of weird science to material that could not have more everyday relevance. . . . Never has Ms. Roach’s affinity for the comedic and bizarre been put to better use. . . . “Gulp” is structured as a vastly entertaining pilgrimage down the digestive tract, with Ms. Roach as the wittiest, most valuable tour guide imaginable."
― Janet Maslin, New York Times
"A delicious read and, dare I say it, a total gas."
― Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe
"With the same eager curiosity that she previously brought to the subjects of cadavers, space, and sex, the author explores the digestive system, from mouth to colon."
― New Yorker
"[A] merry foray into the digestive sciences….Inexorably draws the reader along with peristaltic waves of history and vividly described science."
― Brian Switek, Wall Street Journal
"You’ll come away from this well-researched book with enough weird digestive trivia to make you the most interesting guest at a certain kind of cocktail party…Go ahead and put this one in your carry-on. You won’t regret it."
― Amy Stewart, Washington Post
"A witty, woving romp of a book… Roach…is a thoroughly unflappable, utterly intrepid investigator of the icky."
― Chloe Schama, Smithsonian
"Gulp is about revelling in the extraordinary complexities and magnificence of human digestion."
― The Economist
"Relentlessly fun to read."
― Bee Wilson, The New Republic
"Never before has the process of eating been so very interesting…. After digesting her book, you can’t help but think about what that really means."
― Micki Myers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"One of my top criteria for pronouncing a book worthwhile is the number of times you snort helplessly with laughter and say, “Wow! Did you know that ... ” before your long-suffering spouse throws a book at you from across the room. My personal spouse says that, in this department, “Gulp” takes the cake."
― Adam Woog, Seattle Times
"Letting this brilliantly mischievous writer, for whom no pun is ouch and no cow sacred, dip her pen into the font of all potty humor must have seemed even riskier than her previous excursions into corpses (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk) and outer space (Packing for Mars). But dip she did―at one point she put her whole arm into a cow’s belly―and came up with another quirkily informative pop-science entertainment in Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal."
― Jeffrey Burke, Bloomberg
"Once again Roach boldly goes where no author has gone before, into the sciences of the taboo, the macabre, the icky, and the just plain weird. And she conveys it all with a perfect touch: warm, lucid, wry, sharing the unavoidable amusement without ever resorting to the cheap or the obvious. Yum!"
― Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works and The Better Angels of Our Nature
"As probing as an endoscopy, Gulp is quintessential Mary Roach: supremely wide-ranging, endlessly curious, always surprising, and, yes, gut-wrenchingly funny."
― Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (April 1, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0393348741
- ISBN-13 : 978-0393348743
- Lexile measure : 1100L
- Item Weight : 10.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #466,823 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #146 in Digestive Organ Diseases (Books)
- #147 in Gastroenterology (Books)
- #801 in Anatomy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Mary Roach is the author of Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. Her writing has appeared in Outside, Wired, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. She lives in Oakland, California.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Explaining how Roach’s book is “quirkier” will tell one a lot about Roach’s book and how it differs from Ender’s work. (And since Ender’s writing style could be described as quirky itself, it’ll help clarify that as well.) By “quirky,” I mean that Roach’s book is built around a set of narrow questions that address topics of a bizarre or strange nature. In GULP one will read about whether your pet really wants “paté in beef gravy” [spoiler: it does not], whether the story of Jonah and the whale is BS, how smugglers use their digestive tracts illicitly, what are the benefits of Fletcherizing (chewing your food more thoroughly—much more thoroughly), whether Thanksgiving dinner can split one’s stomach open (like it feels it does), and what’s the worst case flatulence scenario.
This isn’t to say that one doesn’t learn something about the basic science of digestion as one is reading about extreme cases of tasting skill, stomach fistulas, flatulence, constipation, and overeating. One does, but this book isn’t organized to educate one about the alimentary canal systematically and generally. It’s a work of creative nonfiction designed to make the reader keep saying “huh, I never would have thought” and it does an outstanding job of it. You may not have given much thought to some of these topics, but you’ll be craving answers by the time you get past the chapter heading. There’s a reason that Roach’s works top the charts of pop science books. She finds the interesting questions and the most fascinating examples.
There are 17 chapters in GULP, and while they collectively take one on a tour of the alimentary canal, Roach devotes more space to some parts than others. She spends more time on what goes at the head end (smelling, tasting, chewing, and salivating) than does Enders. Also, please don’t think the book is low brow or that it appeals to the lowest common denominator (8 year old boys?) when I tell you that there are three chapters on various dimensions of flatulence.
As I said, you may not have thought much about some of these questions, but you’ll learn something nonetheless. A prime example can be seen in the chapter on smuggling via the digestive tract. I’d read stories of cocaine mules dying when a condom burst in their stomach, but I had no idea about the extent to which items and materials are smuggled down there. It’s not just drugs. One guy was explaining how he smuggled knives. Really. Knives. Plural.
There are a few topics that are well covered by both books. Take, for example, constipation. Roach elucidates the topic using the case of Elvis Presley and others who’ve been literally terminally constipated. (Ender’s—on the other hand—considers the everyman’s constipation, though with amusing drawings and commentary.)
I’d recommend this book for readers interested in learning more about how their food makes its way through—particularly if you like learning about the strange cases.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 24, 2022

There are some truly hilarious and interesting facts in this book. For instance, Roach informs readers that women's farts smell worse than men's, but men release more gas per emission, making the sexes' farts smell about the same. She informs her readers that the average person farts 22 times a day. Her passages on animal cognition were interesting, such as a food's smell accounting for 75% of getting a dog to eat it. Even if it doesn't taste that good, once the dog starts eating, it will continue until it is full. Also interesting is that rats eat about 50% of their own feces because their digestive systems can't break down all of the nutrients in their feed in one go. Those rats deprived of the opportunity to eat their feces become malnourished. In fact, our closest living ancestors, chimpanzees, pick nuts and other undigested foods out of feces and eat them. Far from being crazy to find this interesting, you have to be crazy to not find this interesting.
Also, Roach does tackle some interesting scientific topics in the book. She discusses, for instance, how the lining of the intestinal tract is designed to maximize absorption of nutrients. Also fairly interesting are her discussions about stomach acid and saliva.
However, Roach also makes some glib comments that suggest a lack of thought. One that caught my attention was that she makes fun of vegetarians who feed their cats vegetarian cat feed, pointing out that cats are true carnivores. How ridiculous, she ponders, that vegetarians project their tastes onto cats when it is obvious that cats would prefer meat. Strikingly, it never crosses her mind that most vegetarians know that cats are carnivores and would prefer meat, but feed them vegetarian cat feed because the owners oppose meat production.
My primary complaint is that I really did not leave the book with the understanding of the digestive tract that I was hoping to get. I was hoping the book would provide an accessible and interesting explanation of a complex system, but make it interesting all the while, much like Michael Lewis's works on the financial system or Steven Pinker's works on the brain. And, admittedly, to some degree this book achieved that. I now know many interesting factoids about the digestive system. However, Roach devotes significant portions of her book to things like describing prisoners hiding contraband in their rectum and her encounters with random people I cared nothing about. Roach spends an inordinate amount of time discussing how the people she was talking to looked and acted, which was not particularly interesting or relevant - it felt like highly forgettable filler. Her humor, littered throughout, was oftentimes clever, but never laugh out loud funny. It felt like the book was designed for people who giggle at fart jokes.
If your goal in purchasing this book is to get a good understanding of the digestive system, look elsewhere. If you are just looking to pick out some interesting facts about the digestive system while having a good time, such as for beach reading, then I think you may enjoy this book.
⭐️ ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Top reviews from other countries

The book is a bit of a mixture and dots around from topic to topic whilst keeping in the same area of the body. What is included seems to be at the author's whim rather than anything systematic so you learn more science about one part of the body and more anecdotes about others. I liked the eclectic nature of the content and found the stories and science equally fascinating.
The author has a particular writing style which involves humorous quips as asides and footnotes. This is quite amusing to start with but rather grates by the end - a little too much of a good thing. She is also rather obsessed with what her interviewees are wearing.
I wouldn't say that the book was gruesome but it is dealing with bodily functions (you can work out which ones) and thus is quite graphic in places. Some of the anomalies people have had in their digestive systems are described with a certain amount of glee and there is also some description of some disturbing animal experiments (in the past). I didn't have an issue with any of this because it all added to the book and the story that the author was telling but if you get a bit queasy you might want to avoid some of the pages.
I was pleased I had read this book - I was entertained and informed.


Mary Roach not only follows the food we eat through our digestive tract but recounts past medical oddities, digestion habits of various animals and what Elvis really died of.
It is a fascinating if sometimes slightly repulsive look into our inner workings.
Roach makes information quite accessible to those who have not considered digestion (except when it pains us) and is quite amusing and light-hearted about her research.
I did, at one stage sit down to eat lunch while reading this but found this was not a good idea at all.
An interesting book.

