
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
A
New York Times / National Bestseller
"America's funniest science writer" (
Washington Post) Mary Roach explores the science of keeping human beings intact, awake, sane, uninfected, and uninfested in the bizarre and extreme circumstances of war.
Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat, noise—and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, we learn how diarrhea can be a threat to national security. Roach samples caffeinated meat, sniffs an archival sample of a World War II stink bomb, and stays up all night with the crew tending the missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee. She answers questions not found in any other book on the military: Why is DARPA interested in ducks? How is a wedding gown like a bomb suit? Why are shrimp more dangerous to sailors than sharks? Take a tour of duty with Roach, and you'll never see our nation's defenders in the same way again.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Contents
- By Way of Introduction
- 1. Second Skin
- 2. Boom Box
- 3. Fighting by Ear
- 4. Below the Belt
- 5. It Could Get Weird
- 6. Carnage Under Fire
- 7. Sweating Bullets
- 8. Leaky SEALs
- 9. The Maggot Paradox
- 10. What Doesn’t Kill You Will Make You Reek
- 11. Old Chum
- 12. That Sinking Feeling
- 13. Up and Under
- 14. Feedback from the Fallen
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
- Praise for GRUNT
- Also by Mary Roach
- Copyright