PACKING FOR MARS: THE CURIOUS SCIENCE OF LIFE IN THE VOID

I want to have a beer with Mary Roach. Not only is she hilarious, brilliant, and talented, but we also seem to be fascinated and amused by exactly the same aspects of history and science—specifically, the audacity and quirkiness of human endeavor. Her books don’t just answer the question “What do we know about this topic?” but “What crazy-ass studies did we have to perform to learn it and who the hell had the bizarre job of thinking them up and doing them?” She hunts down interesting factoids, but it’s her irreverent, fearless, delightfully nerdy, voraciously curious approach I really adore; I could read a Mary Roach book about watching paint dry. So, although I have no particular interest in space travel, I loved this book. Bonk and Stiff remain her best works, but this is still a must-read. Roach’s dogged search to discover whether one of the first chimps in space was nicknamed “Enos the penis” by his trainers because he touched himself at a news conference or just because he was kind of a jerk is in itself worth the price of admission.