Sunday, November 6, 2016

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, Mary Roach

I liked this book a lot. Super interesting history of NASA stuff, super interesting anecdotes about astronauts and how gross, boring, and insane their job actually is. There is some stuff about weightless sex and designing space toilets that was both hilarious and horrible, and will stick with me for a long, long time. It's hard to find an excuse to bring it up in a conversation, but I have been trying. I found the tone here a little less wry than in Gulp, and the footnotes less intrusively cutesy. Great, great book; I would recommend it to my students or my friends who just want some interesting and weird science writing.

Oh, and it reminded me how much I like the romance novel series set at not-really-NASA in the 60s. Check them out!

Grade: A
#79 in 2016

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