PACKING FOR MARS by Mary Roach

In an increasingly secular world populated by increasingly cynical adults (like me), holidays have lost some of their inherent shininess. Really, when was the last time you got excited about Easter?  I propose that, in order to replace those holidays that have lost their shine, every adult should have the right to declare a certain number of days a year as “personal holidays.”

If that proposal came to fruition, every time Mary Roach published a new book, I would declare a personal holiday.  

There are few writers who are so consistently good.  And there are fewer who are so good when writing about about such diverse material.**  Roach’s previous three books have been on subjects that are already interesting in their own right: death, the afterlife, and sex.  Roach’s fourth book, PACKING FOR MARS, is about a subject that is, at its core, relatively interesting. But while I would-- and have-- read a book on death, the afterlife, or sex, of my own volition, I’ve never before been compelled to pick up a book about the space travel program.  

Roach could write about anything at this point, and I will pre-order her book from Amazon as soon as its announced.

PACKING FOR MARS explores the complications of space travel from a very Roach-ian prospective.  Sure, she’s a science writer, but she’s not interested in aero-space engineering and the math involved.  She’s interested in the many dozens of ways that NASA and other countries’ space agencies have tried to deal with the problem of disposing of feces in space.  She’s not interested in how we’re going to get people BACK from Mars if we ever send them there (and scarily enough, she’s discovered that some plans to send American astronauts to Mars do NOT include return plans).  She’s interested in how people have sex in zero gravity and whether or not sperm need gravity to swim.  

Whether she’s suppressing the urge to vomit on a parabolic flight or genially swigging reclaimed urine (apparently, it’s refreshing and surprisingly sweet), Roach is as compelling a character as the many astronauts she interviews for the book.  Maybe my favorite thing about Roach is that she’s a humorist who doesn’t knee-jerk rely on our generation’s crutch of snark.  Her shit is just plain funny.  “Compressed food not only took up less stowage-- which is how children and aircraft designers say ‘storage’-- space, it was less likely to crumble,” writes Roach in a typical aside. 

Unless you’re a space junkie, STIFF-- Roach’s debut book-- is a better introduction to her writing.  But PACKING FOR MARS is a book more than worthy of her.

**  The only non-fiction author that rivals Roach in the ability to make anything interesting is Jon Mooallem, who has yet to write a book.  Mooallem has, for the New York Times Magazine, written articles about pigeon control and the complications of creating bagged apple slices that are drool-inducingly mesmerizing.  Mooallem, where the heck is your book?

BLANKETS by Craig Thompson

Another book recommended for my down time, this time recommended by a good friend and former colleague.

Gorgeously drawn and organized memoir in graphic novel form. BLANKETS chronicles a handful of poignant events over the course of Thompson's childhood and young adulthood. Some of the events are tender and help to define the sweeter relationships in Thompson's early years-- that with a brother with whom he shared both tragedy and blissful excapism and that with his first love, though it was a relationship seen through rose colored glasses. Some of the events are difficult to bear-- the brothers' abuse at the hands of their evangelical family, the unraveling of Thompson's relationship with Raina (even though it's inevitable).

Most beautifully drawn (literally and figuratively) is Thompson's internal and external struggle with his faith. Many scenes in which Thompson grapples with Christianity are drawn like stained glass windows and punctuated by scripture.

The book seemed an odd gift from this particular friend, at first, but as we both share an interest in the memoir form and of non-linear narration, as I continued to read, I began to understand. The 600 page graphic novel/memoir was a quick read. Two short nights.

Bonk by Mary Roach

I’ve read Mary Roach’s three books in three days. Not three consecutive days, although for Christmas 2006, I received both Stiff and Spook off my Amazon wishlist as presents from a very understanding (or very confused) family member and devoured them on December 25 and 26 respectively. That should tell you a little bit about me and my holidays.

On impulse, just before I went on Spring Break this year, I Googled Roach and found out that her latest book, Bonk, had just been published just days before. Before I even got to the subtitle, I knew I’d have to pick it up in hardcover. When I read the subtitle: “The Curious Intersection Between Sex and Science,” I knew I had scored. No pun intended, although Roach would certainly appreciate the pun.

Stiff remains my favorite non-fiction book period. Although I read Bonk in a matter of less than a day, chuckled my way through it, and admired its art, surprisingly the subject matter of Stiff, the history of experiments on cadavers, is actually a bit more interesting than sex. Not sex itself. But sex studies. And that points to something that Roach attempted to highlight in her book, specifically that sex study has suffered from such restriction that the answer to so many questions about sex is “we don’t know.”

Mary Roach is the David Sedaris of science writing. In order to give her work its due, I’d have to replicate whole chapters here. While the stand-alone chapters in all of her books highlight the works of particular researchers, Roach always becomes a character, more than a guide, in the research. She not only divulges the substance of the research, but she also discusses the process through which she researches the research.

In Bonk, because of the general reluctance of so many researchers to allow a reporter to witness their work (in her Acknowledgements, Roach makes it clear that many of her subjects jeopardized their funding by allowing her to observe), Roach takes this a step further and actually becomes a research participant in two of the studies.

In Chapter Twelve, “Mind Over Vagina,” Roach discusses her own experience at the Female Sexual Psychophysiology Lab at UT Austin. During this experience, she is asked to insert a vaginal photoplethysmorgraph probe into her… er… vagina and watch a series of videos. She writes, “I take the probe out of the bag. An LED and some wiring are encased in a round-tipped, bullet-shaped piece of clear acrylic. ‘Cinderella’s tampon,’ I write in my notebook… I follow the instructions I was given, and now the cable is curling down in front of my chair. I feel like a bike lock.”

Roach also memorably convinces her husband, Ed, to participate in a 4-D imaging experiment in an MRI machine in London. She says that her guide to good taste reporting of the experience was to make the chapter describing the 4-D copulation palatable for her stepchildren. It is, understandably, one of the briefest chapters in the book.

On April 9, NPR featured an interview on Roach, where she discussed the nature of the experiments of the (sadly recently deceased) Egyptian doctor Ahmed Shafik; although his studies of sex ranged far and wide, he’ll forever be noted as the man who studied rats who wore teeny-weeny polyester drawstring pants. Apparently, it’s a scientific fact that rats that sport Sopranos-wear get less action than those who wear natural fibers. Stunning discovery, and so sad for the entire state of Florida. What the NPR interview left out, though, was that Shafik was a big fan on polyester leisure suits, although he swore to Roach that he never wore faux-fiber undies.

A.J.Jacobs, author of Year of Living Biblically, says in a blurb for Bonk, “I would read Mary Roach on the history of Quonset huts. But Mary Roach on sex? That is a godsend.” Pardon my girl crush, but Mary Roach on anything is a godsend. I’ve devoured her books, gotten downright testy with people who’ve tried to interrupt my reads.

Despite the severely gory and outrageous content of Stiff I have recommended it with no reservations to my students. That being said, it led to no small discomfort when I happened to blab that Roach had written a new book. My kids asked me what I planned to read during Spring Break, and without thinking I mention Bonk. I insisted quite firmly that the book was not appropriate for teens, but I know for a fact that at least one nascent Roach fan went out and bought it. I read the book with her in mind and realized that while it was, honestly, inappropriate for a 17-year-old girl, but… you know, if I’d known just a little bit more about sex before I started having sex, whole chunks of my life might have been different. Probably different good, not different bad.

Perhaps I am justifying my own bad judgment here, but if Roach’s book makes any final proclamation about the nature of human sexuality it is that she reveals through good humor and scientific study that no one really “has it down” when it comes to sex. We’re all different. And for anyone who’s ever felt slightly insecure when it comes to sex, that’s a reassuring scientific fact, and certainly a fact worth knowing when you’re just starting out.

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

A non-fiction book isn’t a novel. Non-fiction is real life, and real life is sloppy, complicated, and sometimes, as in the case of Three Cups of Tea, more far-fetched than fiction. It’s possible that if Greg Mortenson had pitched Three Cups of Tea as a novel to a New York agent his query would have been rejected for being too grandiose.

The thing is, “grandiose” is a word that just doesn’t apply to Mortenson, who spoke on April 1, 2008 to a group of Louisville high school students at the Mohammad Ali Center. He delivered his speech by the light of only the slides he projected on the giant screen; he was soft spoken, but reluctant to use the microphone. And despite the fact that the speech lasted less than an hour, by the end of his time with the students, they were fired up, believers, converts to his mission.

His mission is dictated by a proverb he learned while growing up as a child of missionaries in Africa: “If you educate a boy, you educate an individual. If you educate a girl, you educate a community.”

Since 1993, Mortenson has worked to build more than fifty schools, mostly for girls, in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He’s raised several million dollars for the efforts, survived crushing personal defeats and failures, conquered two fatwas issued against him, become a sort of folk hero in the regions which he’s helped, provided education for tens of thousands of children who would otherwise go un- or inadequately-educated, started a family of his own, written a book that’s landed on the New York Times best-seller list, and become president of the Central Asia Institute.

I lump his accomplishments of the past fifteen years together to amplify their already massive significance; the cover of the book touts a blurb by Tom Brokaw that reads, “Thrilling… proof that one ordinary person… really can change the world.” But there are times when you’re reading the book when you feel as though you’re watching a B adventure movie; when you, as the audience, have already figured out that the shifty Changazi cannot be trusted to warehouse Mortenson’s building supplies, that the men on horseback have no humanitarian issues in mind, that the little old lady in Atlanta is no benefactress. So often, early on when Mortenson seems to fail more often than he succeeds, you find yourself slamming your fist into your desk as you read, cursing the naiveté of this teddy bear of a trusting man who seems determined to overreach, to dream too big.

The lesson of the book, and the reason people are already speculating about Nobel Prize nominations for this man, is of course that Mortenson didn’t overreach. He may have been foolhardy and overly trusting at times—and one gets the sense that he probably still is—but in the end his original ambitions paled that which he has been able to accomplish.

It’s probably a good thing that Mortenson sought out a co-author, not the least of which because the book wouldn’t have been written. This book that nearly lionizes him features interviews with those in his close company who say that he drives them crazy; when he’s not abroad making things happen, he’s a veritable hermit. But after having seen Mortenson speak, it’s easy to believe that if he’d written the book himself, we’d have an overly humble account of his success.

At the speech, he recounted the story of the beginning of his journey; an avid climber, Mortenson swore that he would summit K2 in 1993 to leave a tribute to his younger sister who’d died of epilepsy. According to Mortenson, he’d failed and it was his failure and his subsequent depression that spurred him to promise the small village that helped rescue and nurse him that he would build a school for them. All fine and true, but students who failed to read the book after seeing the speech would have missed out on the fact that Mortenson failed to summit because he chose instead to save the life of a member of his climbing party who’d been reckless and become ill.

That being said, the coauthor, David Oliver Relin, doesn’t quite do the story justice. At times the story is slow and cluttered; the writing is well organized but artless. It’s such a laborious read at the beginning that by the time the first school is built, you feel quite sure that this is the denouement; a full character arc has crested and settled even though there’s still a full half of the book to scale.

That’s Mortenson’s heroism; any mortal would have settled for the thudding achievement of having built not only a school, but a bridge to the school, in this remote, forsaken region of Pakistan under the shadow of K2. Instead Mortenson parlays this success into greater opportunity to spread education throughout the troubled region.

Even in America, education is the answer—or at least one of the answers—to what ails us. In the Middle East, education may be the route to peace and to our own national security. A boy who is educated is much less likely to be swayed to join a terrorist group; a girl who is educated is less likely to become a mother who would sanction her son’s involvement in terror. Women who are educated suffer less infant mortality and are likely to bear fewer children, reducing poverty.

And who better to provide that education? Mortenson was in Pakistan when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. He left weeks later, but returned just weeks after that to places that had been devastated by American retaliation. As America itself had become the source of so much suffering of so many innocent people, here was an American bringing books and buildings and teachers to ameliorate the foundation of hatred against the West—ignorance.

As the old American proverb goes, “Behind every great man is a great woman,” and Mortenson is no exception. Reading Three Cups of Tea, it’s hard at times to not feel as though the emotional hero of the book is Mortenson’s wife Tara, whom he met and married after just six days. Tara is the Mother Teresa of wives (I can just hear a literary agent saying to Mortenson: “You know, Greg, the novel would be much more believable if you left out the part about visiting Mother Teresa’s body as she lay in state. That’s overkill.” Seriously, the guy, on a whim, gets to visit the dead saint’s body!).

The whole book, at times, feels like overkill, sloppy, complicated, larger-than-life overkill. And that’s the beauty of non-fiction, it sometimes feels like the elaborate lead-up to a monumental tall tale, “Let me tell you the one about the guy who grew up in Africa with a sister with epilepsy who died and then he tried to climb K2 and was rescued by a village… and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize.”