Mary Roach Loves Writing About Weird Science

The Book Review

The New York Times

Books, Arts

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The best-selling science journalist Mary Roach has written about sex and death and the digestive system — basically, all of the topics that children are taught to avoid in polite company. In her latest, “Replaceable You,” she examines prosthetics, robotics and other ways that technology can interact with human anatomy. On this week’s episode, Roach tells host Gilbert Cruz how she comes up with her ideas and what keeps drawing her back to the bizarre bits of trivia that the human body offers up.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times book review, and this is the book review podcast.
0:13.7	We gave you a fall fiction preview. We gave you a fall nonfiction preview.
0:18.5	We talked about almost 30 books over the past two weeks,
0:22.2	and hopefully you've made time for both of those episodes and have started saving the books
0:27.4	you want to read. This week, we have on a wonderful writer. Joining me is the author of Stiff.
0:34.9	She's the author of Spook. She is the author of Bonk, and she is the author of Gulp.
0:40.2	She is Mary Roach, the science journalist behind eight popular science books, including her
0:45.9	latest, Replacable You, Adventures in Human Anatomy.
0:50.5	Mary, welcome to the book review podcast.
0:52.9	Thank you very much.
0:55.1	So, Mary, your last book was Fuzz when nature breaks the law.
0:59.1	It was about animals.
1:00.4	It was about essentially what happens when animals and humans come into contact.
1:06.0	They cross that line.
1:07.5	With your new book, you're back on territory that you know very well, which is the human
1:11.8	body, the endlessly fascinating human body. What made you come back? It's just that. It's
1:19.0	endlessly fascinating. It's this weird foreign planet, and I didn't study it in high school or
1:25.8	college, and so I'm like that explorer who keeps finding
1:29.8	new continents and having a blast. So in a way, it's a logical topic for me. I seem to just
1:37.9	be drawn to the human body and all its miraculousness and weirdness. Tell us about the continents you're exploring this go-round here.
1:46.7	It's a pretty big tent. This new book, you write about prosthetic legs, you write about organ
1:52.5	transplants, you write about cataract surgery, you write about the history of the iron lung,
	...

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