Packing for Mars

Science and nature

Print length: 334 pagesW.W. Norton, 2010

Description

Mary Roach approaches human spaceflight from the least glamorous direction: what happens to bodies and minds when air, gravity, fresh food, comfort, and privacy disappear. Rather than concentrating on rockets or heroic milestones, she investigates the practical problems of living beyond Earth, including vomiting, sex, bodily waste, and the engineering of a usable space toilet. Her reporting follows the peculiar research designed to prepare astronauts: animal experiments, prolonged bed rest, parabolic zero-gravity flights, psychological testing, cadaver studies, and high-speed crash simulations. Packing for Mars combines scientific explanation with frank humor to ask how much discomfort and indignity people can endure in pursuit of exploration and what those limits reveal about the human animal.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Direct · Journalistic · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Humorous · Irreverent · Playful

Structure

Episodic

Focus

Ideas · Information · Voice

Emotional intensity

2 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 2 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

Knowledge and truthNature and environmentSurvivalTechnology and society

About Mary Roach

Mary Roach is an American writer who brings popular science into contact with the physical, awkward, and often overlooked facts of human life. Her books range across death, sex, digestion, spaceflight, military physiology, and attempts to study survival after death, but they share a recognizable method: she follows practical questions into laboratories and other unusual research settings, interviews specialists, examines scientific studies, and sometimes places herself inside the inquiry. Stiff considers what donated cadavers make possible; Packing for Mars and Grunt turn away from heroic technology to the bodily strains of extreme environments. In Bonk and Gulp, subjects commonly treated with embarrassment become occasions for precise, curious reporting. Roach’s humor makes difficult or impolite material approachable without displacing the science. What distinguishes her writing is its preference for the unglamorous problem and the revealing detail: the space toilet, the living stomach, the mechanics of arousal, or the experimental uses of the dead. Her books explain science by showing how research is devised, conducted, and limited.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: W.W. Norton
Language: English
ISBN: 9780393068474, 9781611293753

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