“The pie hole and the feed chute are mine.”

"We should have seen this coming. When Mary Roach wrote Packing for Mars, her 2010 book about the bodily experiences of astronauts in space, she seemed especially excited by the feeding, digestive and excremental issues with which NASA had to deal. She has now advanced from the exoticism of space-shuttle toilet training to the universality of the digestive tract. And at last Ms. Roach has a subject that doesn’t make her (insert constipation joke, possibly about Elvis Presley) strain.

     Gulp is far and away her funniest and most sparkling book, bringing Ms. Roach’s love of weird science to material that could not have more everyday relevance. Having graduated from corpses (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook) and sex (Bonk, full of stunts featuring Ms. Roach as guinea pig), she takes on a subject wholly mainstream. She explores it with unalloyed merriment. And she is fearless about the embarrassment that usually accompanies it."
— Janet Maslin, The New York Times
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