Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex | 
 enlarge | Author: Mary Roach
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $14.24
You Save: $10.71 (43%)
New (49) Used (13) Collectible (1) from $14.00
Rating:  44 reviews
Sales Rank: 648
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 0393064646
Dewey Decimal Number: 612.6
EAN: 9780393064643
Publication Date: April 7, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The best-selling author of Stiff turns her outrageous curiosity and infectious wit on the most alluring scientific subject of all: sex.
The study of sexual physiology—what happens, and why, and how to make it happen better—has been a paying career or a diverting sideline for scientists as far-ranging as Leonardo da Vinci and James Watson. The research has taken place behind the closed doors of laboratories, brothels, MRI centers, pig farms, sex-toy R&D labs, and Alfred Kinsey's attic.
Mary Roach, "the funniest science writer in the country" (Burkhard Bilger of The New Yorker), devoted the past two years to stepping behind those doors. Can a person think herself to orgasm? Can a dead man get an erection? Is vaginal orgasm a myth? Why doesn't Viagra help women—or, for that matter, pandas? In Bonk, Roach shows us how and why sexual arousal and orgasm, two of the most complex, delightful, and amazing scientific phenomena on earth, can be so hard to achieve and what science is doing to slowly make the bedroom a more satisfying place. 16 illustrations.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 39 more reviews...
 were you ever in an MRI with a friend? March 31, 2008
89 out of 95 found this review helpful
This a truly great tale of a first-hand look at science and sex from both the inside and the outside! Mary Roach provides a humorous and often very personal view--both as a participant and observer--of humans, animals, and mechanical devices: there is much that you would never have imagined, and perhaps would rather never of heard of at all. She and her husband Ed have sex in a 20-inch diameter MRI tube in the interests of science. The doctor looks on, makes suggestions, and finally tells Ed "You may ejaculate now". The author also recounts the experiments by Kinsey is his attic many years ago and tries to track down the film footage.
The author's great sense of humor needs to be read to be believed. She spares no one, and particularly not herself or her husband. She travels to Taiwan to watch an implant operation. In one of the funniest parts[and this says a lot, since the book will have you howling a lot] she goes to Denmark to watch artificial insemination of sows. We know this happens with cows, and you might suppose that there's not much difference with pigs, but you'd be wrong, very wrong indeed. Suffice it to say that the best results occur, when, among other things best not mentioned here, the AI person lies down on the sow's back and fondles her teats during the process. You may never regard your morning sausage quite the same way again.
The author has a lot of asides that are a delight to read. If you usually skip the footnotes in a book, you'll miss a lot here. You'll learn a lot--for all the things that might seem frivolous, but which are not, the book is a scientific one. Roach has a curiosity, an appetite for knowledge, and has the capability that perhaps most scientists do not have, which is to mix science and humor. Stephen Gould was able to do this, but his humor was not as pervasive--his writing is, at a guess, 95% science at 5% humor, whereas with Roach it's more like 50-50. Martin Gardner's great Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science may be the closest similar work to Roach's book. This book is certainly not for everyone, and there are those who will be deeply offended, but for most it should be a real treat to read!
The Science Of Sex April 1, 2008
32 out of 41 found this review helpful
Ms Roach has written a hiliarious account of science in search of better sex. A lot of her discoveries fall into the category of "It seemed like a good idea at the time." The author of previous off the wall subjects like "Spook" (post-death exploration) and "Stiff" (dead bodies), she has the knack of finding obscure information that no one has ever heard of. While the book is verbally graphic, it is not porn. She injects herself into her story and her humor resembles the writer, P.J. O'Rourke.
The Things We Do For "Love" April 5, 2008
14 out of 15 found this review helpful
Author Mary Roach set out to find and write about sex research around the world (and about the yeilds of that research) and wound up following a lot of very strange paths. From a urologists office in Taipei to a sow furrowing operation in Denmark to a "toy" manufacturer in Chatsworth California, the author tracked down all leads that were presented to her and followed up to learn all there was about how the human anatomy works and why research on this subject is usually cloaked in euphemisms. At times she delves back into the 1800s to explain how we are where we are today and why.
To say the book is funny is an understatement. The author has a gift for puns and uses it to maximum potential, taking material that could be somewhat dry and turning it into page turning reading. If you are interested in the science of sex and love to laugh, this is a wonderful book that will not fail to deliver.
Science, Sex, and an Entertaining Author! May 10, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Once upon a time, Dr. Isaac Asimov attempted to explain the world to everybody. When I was growing up, I devoured both his science fiction and his non-fiction, learning a lot about what had already happened in the world, what was happening at the present, and what yet might happen. I enjoyed his non-fiction books and thought he was really good at explaining science to the layman.
But these days my heart belongs to Mary Roach! I will never stray. She's only written three books, but she's already captured every inquisitive bone and impulse in my body. She's written articles for READER'S DIGEST and NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and her curiosity and propensity for knowledge and instruction seem inexhaustible.
STIFF: THE CURIOUS LIVES OF HUMAN CADAVERS revealed what happened to a body after death. Granted, some stuff maybe I wasn't too thrilled about learning - at first - but Roach took out (most) of the gross effect and totally turned the exercise into an instructional laughfest filled with history and fantastic errata. And the fascination of the subject, as well as her own passion for it, removed the stomach-churn of the experience
In SPOOK: SCIENCE TACKLES THE AFTERLIFE, Roach brought the same kind of intelligent, informative wit to the study of the afterlife and the existence of souls. I knew people were interested in proving the existence of such one way or the other, but I'd never before known to what lengths scientists (and armchair enthusiasts) had gone.
Now Roach delivers, BONK: THE CURIOUS COUPLING OF SCIENCE AND SEX, a hardcore - sorry, couldn't resist - look at the mysteries and mismanagement of sex. When I first saw the plain white, almost virginal book cover, I was entranced. Could a book on that subject really be called by that title? I couldn't help thinking how risque everyone involved was being.
But I couldn't expect anything less of Mary Roach. All (or at least more than I'd ever before guessed at) of the secrets of sex are revealed between the covers, so to speak. She details several of the curious minds that probed into the subject, and the test patients that laid themselves bare. (See? Even I can't approach this subject with a straight face and the occasional ill-conceived giggle and pun.)
I also love history, and Mary Roach makes the most of the study of sex within those parameters as well. She left no rock unturned in her pursuit of this forbidden knowledge that civilization had invented. I knew that the scientists covered regularly in elementary and junior high science classes dug into the field of sex, but I'd never before known exactly to what degree. Nor did I know that some of them might even have murdered patients to gain knowledge. (I mean, how likely is it that a scientist would happen upon the body of a woman who'd died in the throes of orgasm so he could examine her corpse to better understand that function?)
Another thing I love about Mary Roach is that she's apparently willing to go anywhere to seek out knowledge and report back to the armchair scientists who can't afford to go and wouldn't be caught dead asking such questions. (And that's one of the reasons I like Mike Rowe on DIRTY JOBS.)
For this book, Mary Roach interviewed dozens of people, examined dozens of secret documents, took a tour of a pig farm and watched sows get artificially inseminated, first hand (by hand!), and even enticed her own husband into having sex while being subjected to an MRI. I have to admit, that after seeing Roach in action - forgive me - I can't help but believe that has to be one of the most interesting marriages in the world. I love my wife, but I'm not crawling up onto an MRI table to be watched by scientists for anybody.
Roach goes on to explore several other reconstructive surgery avenues physicians and surgeons have pursued over the year. Just when you think she can't top the last chapter, all you have to do is turn the page.
If you haven't discovered Mary Roach, if you think reading Masters and Johnson's HUMAN SEXUAL RESPONSE has made you an expert in the field, pick up BONK and become truly educated and amazed. Her chapter on Master and Johns, and their peers, casts that research in a totally different light and I found myself alternately appalled and amused.
The science field has a new champion ready to educate and entertain the masses, and her name is Mary Roach. I can't wait to see where she's going next.
The View from the Sexual Research Frontier April 16, 2008
8 out of 12 found this review helpful
"I think by now you know how science is", says a researcher to Mary Roach. "You think you know a lot until you start to ask some really basic questions, and you realize you know nothing." That's perhaps a koan-like exaggeration, but it is certainly true that good research answers questions only to turn up more questions. This might be even more true in the arena of sexual research, the topic of Roach's enormously entertaining and informative _Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex_ (Norton). Roach has before written books about scientific evaluation of the physical and spiritual afterlife of the dead, and if she could make such macabre topics engaging and funny, you can count on a lively treatment of how science investigates sex. Part of the reason this book is so interesting is, of course, that everyone is interested in sex, and there is a great tangle of complicated hormones, engorgements, and reflexes that operate to give us sexual joy and we cannot even feel many of them operating. Another reason is that we got a late start in the scientific evaluation of the subject. Kinsey and Masters & Johnson were pioneers in a sphere where few others had gone before, because of a taint of naughtiness. Another reason the book is so interesting is that you can read all the books on chemistry, physics, or cosmology you want, and you will never find experiments as funny as those of the Egyptian researcher who monitored the coital rates of rats who wore polyester pants. And that's just one example of the experiments here.
Roach loves her subject, which she says is "as good as science gets" because it involves researchers who display "a mildly outrageous, terrifically courageous, seemingly efficacious display of creative problem-solving, fueled by a bullheaded dedication to amassing facts and dispelling myths in a long-neglected area of human physiology." She certainly gets into the spirit of the effort by recruiting her good-sport husband to be the first couple scanned in coition by 3D sonography."For the still images, we must hold still for several seconds, like Victorians posing for a tintype, only not like Victorians posing for a tintype." Roach reports on most of the other research without participating in it, like a paper from five years ago called "The Human Penis as a Semen Displacement Device". Not only did our male evolutionary forebears want to deposit their own semen into vaginas, they wanted to scoop out any semen from predecessors, and it turns out the shape of the glans at the end of the penis is just right to do this. This experiment involved no humans except for the experimenters. They used artificial semen (the recipe is given in the book), an artificial vagina from California Exotic Novelties, and three different artificial phalluses, one of them a control without a glans. The lifelike phalluses expelled 91% of the standing semen, while the cylindrical control expelled only 35%.
Roach has an appealing jocular prose, and her subjects in one chapter after another are, well, the sorts of scientists that would study such things, so they make for entertaining interviews. This does not keep her book from being packed with information, some of it at the cocktail-chatter level and some decidedly deeper. Here is the vaginal photoplethysmograph probe, and to balance that, the nocturnal penile tumescence monitor. Here is how Danish pig farmers stimulate sows so that artificial insemination has a better chance of success. Here is a report of the "inside-out" maneuver performed during surgery on the penis. Here are reflections about how doing sexual research was almost forbidden in the fifties, and then it became acceptable and fundable, but now in an era of "just say no" it has become difficult again. Here are explanations of how victims of paraplegia, who ought not to have sensation below the waist, can get orgasms. Here is evaluation of the famous upsuck theory of female orgasm, and an admission that studies comparing conception rates of women who have sex with orgasm and those who have sex without have simply not been done. Here are descriptions of sexual quackery from the past, including during the witch craze when witches were busy collecting men's penises by magic and putting them in the nests of birds who helpfully kept them alive with a diet of oats and corn. Here is the shorthand code used by the San Francisco Fire Department for sex toy emergencies. And here are some results from a forgotten study that issued from the lab of Masters & Johnson. The most fulfilling sex seems to have been that between committed gay and lesbian couples. Roach says, "Not because they were practicing special secret homosexual sex techniques, but because they `_took their time_.'" They moved slowly and lingered over each other's pleasure. They teased. They talked. Well, perhaps Roach examined research with more revolutionary lessons, but nonetheless, it might be practical to put this one into action.
|
|
|
