mel and we are moving along slowly. >> do you still see a lot of amputees? >> yes that remnant of the war still exists in some parts of the country that are very remote which i read about ingredients of tomorrow and they have been changing because they are so remote out of the capitol city where there is a lot of development. so we do see a lot of people, but a lot of people are very dignified. there's nothing you can do if your hand is that is one thing i love if it wasn't for that none of us would know what happened in sierra leone. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2. radiance of tomorrow.

ishmael beah's second book is coming out in january of 2014. .. >> mary roach, how did elvis

die. >> well, there are different theories but my belief, based on research for my book, is he was a vic of severe constipation and associated sudden death. >> host: how did you find that out? >> guest: one fine day i was talking to somebody at the -- here in d.c., the armed forces institute museum. they have a monstrous colon, a huge -- subjects some severe difficulties, internal difficulttives. mega colon. the woman happened to say to me elvis presley died of that. and i went, what? and i spent a day with elvis presley's doctor and learned about the king's troubles with severe constipation. >> who was his doctor? >> -- nick -- dr. nick nickopolus. >> what was that like?

cincinnati was lovely. it was the anniversary of elvis' death and friends were milling around. dr. nick was doing a memorial tribute. then i went over to his house, the house that elvis had built for him in the '70s, and and dr. nick and i sat around in the living room of this wonderful 1970, at the time very posh place. great big rooms, and we sat there, dr. nick here and his wife, edna, and edna would be -the-furniture was quite far apart and i would try to lean down and put my coffee. i'd have to get up slightly to get the coffee down, and dr. nick and i talked about elvis, and every now and then edna, from -- would pop up with an observation or comment about priscilla presley. so this little dispatch from the distant island nation of edna. >> host: what did you learn from

dr. nick? >> guest: i was there to talk about -- well, i should explain to people. "gulp" is adventures on the alimentary canal. from nose to tail, and this chapter, is it possible to die of constipation? and you hear sometimes about people who died upon the toilet. the throne. you know. which i guess would be appropriate with elvis. anyway issue was -- anyway i was bid in this notion. most people assume it was an overdose that killed elvis, and in fact he certainly took a lot of drugs and that didn't help, but the actual moment of death as far as i could tell from the autopsy, from the cause of death was a fatal heart arrhythmia, which can come on when somebody is pushing, straining at stools. so the moment of death would appear to have been defecation

associated. so, fit right in with the book, and i thought i need to talk to dr. nick, who was lovely, gracious man in his 80s now, and invited me in, and we sat around and had coffee and chatted about elvis and constipation and things. >> host: where did you get the idea to write "gulp"? >> guest: "gulp" is so roachable. it's just a wonder i didn't write about this topic before. it's kind of a taboo subject, and i enjoy writing about taboo topics that -- particularly that relate to the human body, partly because it's fun to play with taboo, because everybody stays away from it. therefore, all the more for me to play with. i'm kind of the bottom feeder of nobody fiction. so, i'll tack that. you don't want to do that? i'll do it. and because it's taboo, i think people -- anything taken away

and made taboo, people are secretly fascinated with. kind of like somebody says, you're on a dealt that you can't have any desserts or whatever, and that's the thing you crave. so people are both repulsed and drawn to it, and they kind of want to peek behind the curtain. so i'm pulling the curtain apart for people. and i also -- i think when it's your own body you're talking about, the taboo does it a disservice, because sometimes people have issues that it don't even feel talking to their doctor about, like elvis presley's problems. those are things because it's taboo people don't want to bring it up. they feel embarrassed. cop -- constipation is embarrassing. >> host: you write, there's an up napable feeling head had ten time inside any life. a mix of wonder, privilege, humidity, and all that border on

feel. i it in a field of snow in alaska with the northern lights overhead so seemingly close. i dropped to my knees. i am walloped by it in the mountains, looking up the sparkleing sphere smear of our galaxy. >> what made you have that feeling? >> guest: well, i decided to get my first colonoscopy without any drugs, because i wanted to see what it looked like in there, because my feeling was, this is your own body and here is this opportunity, this very, very rare opportunity to see these miraculous parts of you that are day in and day out keeping you alive and doing these amazing things, and i thought, okay, i'm going to observe this. i'm going to see my own colon. and i expected to feel the emotions that i'm describing there in the passage that you just read. when in fact i felt mild to

moderate cramping. but -- anyway, that had been my hope, it would be this kind of transcendent experience, and it was actually very -- it was an amazing thing to witness. however, the intermittent sharp pain and discomfort kind of distracted me from my goal of lofty feelings. >> host: mary roach, there's national museum of health and medicine here in washington? what's there? >> guest: that's the mega colon. the home of the mega colon, which inspired the trip to memphis to visit with dr. nick, elvis' physician, personal physician for many years. so, that is the mega colon that brought on this whole chapter. >> what does bonk mean? >> guest: bonk is slang for sexual intercourse. i have to say, though, people are going to start calling going, excuse me, i believe that you misspelled the title. it's boink, not bonk.

to which i reply, yeah, okay, it is both. bonk is a little more common in the uk. it's in fact -- that's what people say in the uk. i grew up in new england and we said bonk, and to me boink is a silly word, and bonk is like, -- it's -- people will write to me and said, think it's boink, like nobody noticed the title had been misspelled. but enough people complained that i had made up for book tours a little yellow letter "i" to -- the test on the cover of the paperbook is yeley. a little peel and stick letter "i" that i had a whole of and people could apply to the cover of their book if it really bothered them i used bonk

instead of boink. >> host: what did you research in the book? >> guest: "bonk" is a book about sex labs. and i'm saying it's a book about people, brave souls, who studied the physiology of sex. not gender stuff or sociology or h.i.v. transmission but specifically just the bio mechanics and the physiology of arousal, orgasm, intercourse. so people say, this is a human systems and it deserves deservee studies and understood, and for centuries nobody did that. it wasn't until the -- well, masters and johnson, and kinsey got it roling in earnest, put the until the '40s and '50s nonwanted to go there so i looked at brave souls who went there. so that is that the book is about. >> host: how significant were the masters and john since

consistency studies. >> well, kinsy had people come in and do this long -- not unlike this three-hour interview. he would do an extensive interview about sexual habits, what do you do, how many times, what position? really very specific personal questions about people's sexuality, and he published these two volumes and that was quite controversy the things he uncovered. so that was mostly what -- however, he did get interested -- we're talking the '40s and early '50s and he did bring people up into the attic of his house in indiana, and the attic sessions were essentially him with a movie camera and a not pad, observing-taking notes, and answering certain questions he had and studying the process of the sexual response cycle as it would come to be called.

build the work was never published in any journal or anywhere else. it was -- he didn't have an institute. wasn't wearing a white coat. masters and johnson actually -- this is in the '50s, mind you -- brought volunteers in to be observed, and sometimes it was couples or sometimes one person, and they took -- they were just documenting the entire sexual response cycle in men and women, like beginning stages of arousal, the plateau stage, orgasm, the whole thing, and really specific, and to publish this book -- human sexual response, cam out in the '50s -- the date's in the book cut by a time when it was really scan dellous, and they had gob out of their way to dress it up in the trappings of formal science there would be -- they came up witheuphemisms for

things with a lot of syllables. a couple having next the lab would be the reacting unit. if the man lost his erection, a failure of ewrecktive performance, all pornography would be system lative literature. everybody had a multisyllabic. it's a big book and very thorough. even though there's nothing scandalous in there, they had so much hate mail they had to hire a second secretary to handle all of the hate mail. so my hat's off to them. it was a tremendously brave thing to do at the time. very conservative era. nothing like this had ever been done, and they did it. and they got people to come into the lab. that was the amazing thing. i would have loved to interview some of their subjects, but they were anonymous and masters and

johnson were fiercely protective of their identities, and i was going to put an ad in the paper saying, if you were one of those subjects, please contact me. and several people said, if you do that and we have tried, you will get people pretending to have been subjects who just want to tell you these titillating and absolutely false stories. so, i thought, well, how can i kind of -- how can i get across to people what -- i wanted to know, what would that have been like to -- it's an extraordinarily awkward situation to be in a laboratory setting with somebody in a white coat with a note pad, then going to say, okay, now -- remove your clothes and proceed to do what you ordinarily do. don't mind us. pretend we're not here. so, the way i got around that is, i -- well, i did find somebody -- it's not common these days -- not very many

studies where two people are required -- if you're studying arousal or orgasm, whatever it is, you can do that with one person. if you know what i mean. you don't necessarily have to have two people. so i did find one study, and i asked -- it was a dr. dang in london, a four-dimensional ultrasound imaging study, they could actually make a four-dimensional film of the body parts in question, and i e-mailed dr. deng, and i said, i'm very interested in this next project you have. this is a man who had been published. it was a legitimate research venture. and i said, i'm really interested in this historic jung take -- undertaking, could i be there in the room? and he wrote back right away and he said, well, you -- yes, you

could, but we're having difficulty finding a brave couple for intimate study. so if your organization would like to provide a volunteer, i'd be happy to arrange it. so, my organization called its husband, and i believe the way i phrase it was not entirely forthcoming. i said to ed, you know how you haven't been to london? 25 years? and let's go, and i'll take care of everything. stay in a nice hotel. the west end, jeremy irons is in something,ing a big beer, stonehenge, we have to have sex in from of a guy in a white coat and that -- >> my muss, -- my husband, ed, a wonderful capacity for denial. so he latched on to the, hey, we're going london, and did not

even think about the segment in which we were going to have to -- and this is ultrasound. people say you were filmed in an mry tube and i'm like, no, actually there was no mri tube. in a that case you would have privacy, at least. a little cramped up and comfortable but privacy. with ultrasound, the guy is right here with the wand. so, was one of those -- it was a tremendously awkward experience, but at the same time i was thinking, this is going to be so fun to write. going to be so much fun to write up. miss husband ed deserves a medal for this bass he didn't have any sort of silver lining for him. for him it was a really awkward thing, and of course the burden of performance is on him. and i -- yeah. i could go into more detail but i don't think we need to right here. >> host: in your first book, "stiff," the curious lives of

human cadavers, the first line is the human haven'tes the approximate size and weight of a roaster chicken. how did you discover that? >> guest: one of the places i went to in "stiff --" thicks -- this is a book about postmortem careers. people who have donated their body to science, research, education, and some of the more unusual places that they've ended up. people are familiar with anatomy classes and dissection, but there's a lot of other things that dead people have gotten up to over the years that are quite fascinating. one of them is that surgeons will use cadavers to practice on, and to learn techniques or to refresh themselves and to practice -- basically you don't want to practice on a live person. so the dead are useful for practicing.

and the place i went was a seminar for a facial and reconstructive surgeons and they were practicing techniques on heads. and people think, why didn't they have the whole body? and the thing is with cadaver research, you don't want to waste usable tissue, so you would -- the head would be in recop struck stiff plastic surgery lab. the arm might be, say in a test of a power window to make sure that if somebody's hand were in it, wouldn't cause an injury. the legs might be -- anyway, you can be in five places at once as a research cadaver. which i think is kind of a pretty ultimate multitasking. so the heads were in -- they had them set up -- this is a long-winded answer. they were in roasting pans of the sort that you would use to roast a chicken, and because in fact they're about the same size.

so i happened to make that observation because there were 30 heads in roasting pans in this surgical training seminar that i was at in texas. >> host: who donates their bodies? >> guest: i think people who donate their bodies tend to be people like myself, kind of practical, utilitarian, cheap. it's door-to-door service, they pick you up no rigmarole with the funeral home. you can do a service if you want to but you don't have to. so they'll pick you up and you go -- plus you get this sort of wonderful feeling of having donated, making a donation to science, contribution -- >> host: tax deductible? >> guest: that would require putting a value on a dead body, and if you -- which is an interesting issue, because dead bodies are kind of like cars.

if you part by part, if you added up what each individual part sells for, although shipping and handling you're not selling the goods but if you take the cost of each individual one and add them up, it's a far greater number than it would be just for a whole body. so, it's difficult to put a figure actually on -- should irs audit -- well, see, the irs -- this is not going to audit you on it. going to be a really strange scenario if they audit you after -- beyond the grave. >> host: there is a shortam of dead bodies for surgeons, et cetera? >> guest: yes and no. people -- depending on where you live, because if you're in -- if you live somewhere near, say, stanford or harvard, people love to donate to those schools. it's kind of like you can say, i'm going to harvard.

i've often thought they people who run the real body program that should have t-shirts that say, i'm going harvard, the donated body, and there can be two medical schools close by. there's, like, duke and another smaller college that -- a medical school but doesn't have the same prestige so duke is always sort of quietly giving some of their surplus. so there's regional surpluses and deficits. some places have plenty of bodies, others are always scrambling to get more bodies. >> host: in "stiff," the cure use lives of human cadavers you write it makes little sense to try to control what happened to your remains when you're no longer around to reap the joys or benefit0s of that control. people who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who are troubled with the concept of not existing. >> guest: yeah, that is the number one reason in my

experience, that people cite when -- they're not going to donate -- they don't want to donate their body to science, to research, to education. they say i want to be able to say what it's used for. i want to cure cancer. i dope want to be used in a plastic surgery seminar. people want to exert control over the circumstances, though they're no longer in the circumstances at the time. so in a way it's a way of still being around. people don't -- people have a lot of difficulty with the prospect of no longer being around. of course, you're not going to be around to care or to take issue, so it doesn't make -- not a rational thing. i know the feeling. people say, well, are you -- you wrote this book, you presumably are going to donate your body to science, and i have to say i have the paperwork for stanford

and ucsf medical school, two schools withins the radius of where i live in the bay area. so i have the paperwork, but i haven't filled it out. i'm kind of like a college senior. i'm like, sort of deciding where i want to go, and what's the view like from the anatomy lab over there at ucsf and what are the facilities and how am i going to be stored. who cares? i'm dead! but i have that irrational kind of desire to -- and i also think it's interesting. i haven't pulled the trigger. i haven't filled out the form, signed it and turned it is. and as the author of "stiff," kind of have to. to be cremated now would be -- just seems wrong. but i have not quite got up the nerve. >> host: the last chapper in "stiff" is remains of the author, will she or won't she, is the title.

mary roach, you right you're:concerned about ed. >> guest: yes. >> host: and his take on your being donated. >> guest: yes. ed is my husband, and ed is a very squeamish man, and the thought of me or him become upon a table -- for him he's like, do i get to keep my underwear on? that's what he focused on. i don't want to take my underwear off in a roomful of strangers. plus you're dead, you look like crap. that's his concern to me, the taught of me being parceled out and used was disturbing to him, and one of the things i realize in talking to medical ethicists and various people is that the wishes of the living are more important than the wishes of the dead. somebody said, if somebody leaves elaborate plans for their

remains that has a tremendous impact on the living. the people who just lost their loved one. so it's hard enough to cope with the loss of somebody, and then to find out they wanted to be donated to science and they're going to be used in some kind of research or experimentation or whatever it is, and that is an upsetting thing for the family. but the people who work in will body programs will usually go -- take the side of the living because the dead, lefts face it, they're dead, and the living still have emotions and things to deal with. and so when that -- that circumstance does occasionally present itself where the family is very, very uncomfortable with the wishes of the deceased to become -- go to an anatomy lab or be used in medical research. it's very upsetting for them. and in that case the body wouldn't be. it's not like the university is going to come and pull the body away from the funeral home.

it's horrible, traumatic tug of war. they let it go. they understand. >> host: being caught in possession of a corpse's cuff links was a crime, but being caught with the corpse itself carried no penalty. what kind of laws there are regarding body snatching, corpses, et cetera. >> guest: yes. in body snatching is different -- grave robbing -- we're going back 17, 1800s. grave robbing was the practice of stealing somebody's cuff links, the family heirlooms, the jewels, stuff of value. for centuries there was no need to have a law about body snatching because who wants to go to the trouble of digging up a grave to pull up a dead body. there's no value. so for centuries, no value in a dead body. but then when they -- with the dawn of anatomy schools in the

1700s, 1800s and on, anatomy schools needed dead bodies. they needed to have material for dissection, and no one back then filled out a will body form and donated their body science. so i you wanted to study the human body, wanted to teach anatomy, you had to pay a body snatcher, or resurrectionist was another term that was used. and these were folks who would go into cemeteries, and they would have been casing the cemetery because you have to be a fresh body. have to be one that's just been buried. they don't want to practice dive section on a decomposed body. so they're looking for a fresh grave and they would come in late at night and dig up the body and take it over to the anatomy school and they would be paid for the bodies. and they did quite well. they were dish have a number in

"stiff" of the number of part and fulltime resurrectionists employed in lop don, and edinburgh, and i don't remember the number but it was a popular way to make a living, and even then there was a shortage because some of the schools back then -- at least one instance you could pay part of your tuition in bodies. you could as a student -- students -- a midnight prank, dig up a grave, get the body, bring it in, and then you get tuition credit and get a discount on tuition. you provide some material. >> host: you write the instructors bail known as the kind of guys to whom you could take your son's amputated leg and sell it for beer money. 37-1/2 cents to be exact. happened in rochester, new york, in 1831. republic to book tv's in department. our guest is author mary roach. and she began writing books in 2003 and that first pick is

"stiff. the curious lives of human cadavers." all second book in 2005. pie spock. science tackled the afterlight." -- bonk" and packing for mars and then "gum. adventure in the alimentary canal."

>> host: when did did you've start being interested in this stuff? >> guest: i grew up in well, i whereas was barn no handover new hampshire, and i grew up in a little town in vermont, right on the other side of the river. i grew up in small town, a college town, dart moth, my parents both worked at dartmouth. and we weren't in down -- we were in aetna, because my father was an assistant professor so we couldn't afford the fancy houses in handover, so we were in aetna, and that's where i spent most of my junior high and high schools. that's where i was. >> i did not have the thought to be a writer. did not give any thought to my writer all the way through themy senior year of college. i had this sense of, well, i --

i went to wesleyan and going to graduate and someone will see i'm this special kind of person with a lot of potential to do something, and i really had not a clue. i had -- okay. when i was in sixth grade i had a desire to be the person that, when you write a letter to a company, say, like, scrubbing bubbles, hello, really love scrubbing bubbles. do you actually make a windup scrubbing bubble or something? the person who wrote the letters back. i thought it would be fun to be the person -- i think you call it corporate communications maybe now. i had that -- that was something i thought would be fun to do. that's as far as i -- i never wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer, an actress, writer. i never gave -- i just never gave it any thought.

>> host: after you lest wesleyan, what happened? >> guest: i got in a driveaway car -- might still have driveaway cars. it was a service, kind of a shady service, where somebody has a car, they leave on the east coast and moving to the west coast and they want to get their car out there as cheaply as possible. well, you as a college student, someone without a lot of funds, want to travel across country, you volunteer to drive the car with a bunch of your friends. you're not paid, but you get a free car to use, and then the poor person on the other enreceives this car that's been run down, taken out to death valley and back. odometer turned back. we had an olds cut has supreme and the mirror find out. and i came out in a driveaway war consecutive -- car with two

friends and i heard san francisco was cool place and there was this thing called dim sum where they pushed carts around with chines food and you would point to what you wanted on the cart and this seemed exotic and there was no chinese food in aetna. and this sounded kind of exotic so off i went to san francisco with no clue what i would do to make a living. but you -- back then you just got a job also a waitress, market research, catering. temping, all that stuff you can do to pay the rent. my rent was $185. i lived at the corner of haight and ash bury in the hath. -- in the haight. >> host: what would that cost today to live there? the rents in san francisco now -- yeah. just one room -- probably 2,000

bucks -- well, maybe not that high for just one room. maybe about a thousand bucks. i haven't check out the rents there lately. >> host: did you begin work at the san france zoo? >> yeah. i got a john at the san francisco zoological society, which supported the zoo, nonprofit. and i worked in the public affairs assistant, and -- a public relations job, and i realized pretty soon that i'm not cut out for public relations because this is what would happen. i'd -- we took all the calls from the press, and so every now and then, because the public -- the zookeepers and the society, certain amount of ill will in between, and my boss -- anyway, the zoo keepers would -- i got

call i was told that the cheetah was sucked dry by fleas, and at my job, public'lls, i was damage control. i should deny, spin, anything, but i would be like, really? okay, how much blood in one flea and how much blood in a cheetah? how many flees would that take to suck dry? i would go off on a tangent and taking the side of the reporter and completely abandoning my job, which was to mitigate the damage and deny or whatever, stall, or whatever, anything to keep us out of the press in a bad light. so, i didn't last very long. but it was very fun job. i worked in a trailer by gorilla world. sometimes people would knock on the door and -- zoo visitors and

say, excuse me, is this gorilla world? and i'd go, not quite. close. >> host: how didout get from there to "stiff" in 2003? >> guest: well, for a long time i wrote for magazines. i was freelance writer. the zoo job was halftime so i was doing some freelance writing while i worked there, which is a nice way to transition to freelance. i didn't go cold turkey from fulltime to freelance, which even back then was a tough row to hoe. so i would write for the san francisco examiner, sunday might, that's where i got my start, freelancing for them. i did a little copyrighting, commercial writhing. i wrote for the banana republic, when it used to be travel clothes, safari stuff, that was supposedly found overseas in these exotic locales like army

pants from india, but by the time i came to banana republic job, the clothing was not being found in exotic places and we would have to come up with stories for the clothes, little stories. >> host: are you saying you had make the stories up. >> guest: i'm saying we made the stories up, yes. >> david chow from new york city e-mails: do you consider your work and findings to be scientific and how do you find science to be devrin shaded from work that does not cop form to this method? >> guest: do i consider my work to be scientific? i consider what -- i report on work that its scientific. i think of scientific as in, you are doing formal research that is published in journals. so i am reporting on the scientific material that is published in journals.

what was the second half? i think that was -- >> host: yeah, i think that was the point. whether you consider your work to be scientific. >> guest: yeah. well, no, because i guess the word scientific to me suggests you are a scientist who is doing formal research that will be published in scientific journals, or science journals. >> host: is there life after death? >> guest: i don't know. i just wrote a book on it. >> host: what's your conclusion? >> guest: you know what, this -- "spook," my second book, it wasn't -- i knew from the get-go it was unlikely that mary roach, with her b.a. in psychology, ways going to be the person who, after all these millenia, would pin down the definitive answer to the week what happens -- to the question, what happens to us

when we die? and this started with a chapper in "stiff" that had to do with people trying to physically find the soul in a body. they would take a body and -- part of early dissection was looking around for -- at all these bits and pieces and going, is this the center of the being? the soul? and a lot of that work was obviously in the head because people very early on could tell, with a head injury, something happened to someone's essence. they're no longer themselves. they change or disappear. so, the head was the place that people looked anyway. in that chapter on the physically looking for the soul, i got interested in the notion that you could use scientific -- there's that word -- use scientific method -- apply that to something as e -- -- the

spirit of soul but bringing that search into a laboratory setting i found interesting. so i was interested in the techniques and the people and what they had done to go at that question, rather than setting out to provide the definitive answer for people. i think that when you look at the question, what happens when we die? religion is a better place for you to search than science right now. partly because it's very difficult to -- how do you define the soul? how do you define spirit? what are you looking at? like trying to bring love into a laboratory setting. you need to -- for your subject pool you need to find people who are or aren't in love. if you leave it up to them how do you know that that person is experiencing is the same as -- no way to quantities identify it. -- no way to quantify it. no way to be sure they're experiencing the same thing. likewise with a soul or spirit,

what are we talking about here? so it's a problematic area to bring into the lab, but a fascinating one. so that was what the book -- >> host: you explored the 21 grams. >> guest: yeah. yeah. that notion of 21 grams comes from a physician, duncan mcdougal in the 1900's, worked in a tuberculosis sanitarium, and sadly there were a lot of people were dying so he had kind of a reddy subject pool to work with, and he had this idea that you might be able to prove that the soul had substance by putting somebody on a very sensitive scale as they die and at the moment they die you look at the needle and see if it goes down a tiny bit. so a very primitive way to go at it but i just loved the fact that he decided to do it and did

it. he had an industrial scale and he outfitted it with a cot and he would install these patients who were -- you can tell when somebody is -- is dying -- so you can tell when somebody is in the exodus mode as my mother's physician once put it. you can tell. so they installed the people on their -- looked at it. a very fraught experiment. word got out in the community. people felt this was inappropriate. at one burst in and disrupted that weighing. another time he has having trouble zeroing the scale. so one clearcut case where he claims the needle went down 21 grams. so, that's where that comes from. >> host: in "spook" you write: alas for me a belief is not something you're born into or

you simply choose to adopt one day. belief for me calls for plausibility. >> guest: that's just me. i was the kind of kid, my mother was a catholic, she was raised -- catholicism was very important to the family. i have a photograph of my great-grandmother who had build into their doorway, her own holy water supply. like the -- she had -- a local priest was giving her, her own supply. my mother -- my grandmother wanted my mother to become a nun. catholicism is very important in that side of my family. my mother was an endless source of frustration for her that it didn't take with me. i was the kind of kid -- my mom would read to me from the bible at night, and i was the kind of kid, she'd read to me about when the when the walls came down and the priests were trumpeting, and i felt like, but isn't it

possible there was an quake at the same time in how do you know. the hornes. could have been a coincidence. i was that kind of annoying kid. or jesus walked on the water. what if there's one of those holes where the surface was only a couple inches before the water. maybe he was walking on that. how do we know he was walking on the weather? did anybody go in the water and look at what was under there? i was that kind of kid. even though i didn't go into science, i didn't major in science, it was just -- i guess i'm just wired that way. >> host: in "gulp," placing history aside, let's look the die jess stiff arrests of a -- digestive reality of a whale -- >> guest: all that reading of the bible, it stayed with me. not in the way my mother would

have liked. she didn't engender much faith or catholicism but the images stayed with me. my mother's bible had beautiful reproductions of paintings, and i don't know who the artist was because theirs a painting of jonah and the whale and it's -- oddly it's a bailine whale, and jonah is halfway our and wearing this red robe and his hair is wet and he appears to be swimming out of the whale and that image -- all of the images in my mothers bible are in the brain, and i thought, it would be interesting to fact check that in the sense that there is whale in which you could live. in fact, wouldn't be a bailine whale. it would be the sperm whale.

the sperm whale feeds like suction, giant squid, all the way in, and the first stomach is big enough to allow a man which in other whales it wouldn't be. so the sperm whale is the choice, and there's no acid in the first compartment so that's handy. unfortunately the sperm whale chews with its stomach, and you -- say you were a scuba diver and you had an air tank, you've might be able to survive for a while and it would be quite uncomfortable. broken bones or at the very least a lot of discomfort. but you could possibly in a sperm whale. so that led to -- i became curious about, the experience of being prey inside the stomach of an animal that swallows its prey

whole, chug human beingses and housesters. i love otherwisesters. i chew them but some people don't chew they're oysters, so i spoke to a biologist about what that experience would be like for an oyster, and i -- so that a chapter that has to do with the possible reality of living inside another person's stomach. >> host: ann i'm eadess -- writes in i witnessed an autopsy and was astounded the way the body was treated. the pathologist would weigh the ore goon and go for a three-pointer in returning the organ to the body cavity. right then there and there decided i would never allow an autopsy on myself or nip i loved unless it was coroner's case and there isn't any permission involved. >> guest: interesting. i've never seen an autopsy but i from time to time would hear stories about anatomy labs.

mostly from the '60s, people talking about medical school when they were younger. now that medical schools have gone to fairly extensive lengths these days to instill a sense of respect and gratitude in medical students, and that includes having people from hospice come and talk to the students before they begin the gross anatomy course. also, they typically will do a memorial service at the end of the anatomy class, not all schools but a lot of them now. and i went to one of those, not knowing quite what to expect. thinking, oh, this is something that all the students are going to because they have to go. but in fact the students had -- the students got up on the stage and -- not all of them but a lot of them. some of them read journal entry.

there was a woman who read this tremendously moving passage where she said, she said, when i -- this was a directed the cadaver -- when i palpate an abdomen, i think of your abdomen. when i listen to a heart, i see your heart. it was -- and people were teared up. was teared up. it was very emotional. someone had composed a green day song, composed a song. so the readings came from the students and it was obvious there was a lot of emotion they hadn't really processed they were now expressing to the group, and in many schools the families are invited as well. the families of the cadavers. so i -- i was -- every anatomy class and i don't know what goes on when there's not a writer there. people on their best behavior

when someone is in the room with them in and a note pad. my sense is people out there are -- that students today are a lot more respectful. used to be there was this whole tradition of taking photographs. a group of students who were working on the body would pose for a photograph and they would sometimes have the cadaver sitting up and, these photographs were then used as christmas cards sometimes. a whole book -- i forget the name of the book but it's a coffee table book of these photographs. but it was not -- it was what people did back then. i think you have to look at these things in the context of the day. also, humor was encouraged as a coping strategy, and years and years ago. now that's not the case. yeah, it's a -- i can't -- i

haven't spent a lot of time in pathology labs. i suppose if your day-to-day job is doing anatomy, you become a little desensitized, and it's -- when it's your job to work on dead bodies, they are very much tissue and not people. they are no -- they look like people but they're not people and that's very difficult for people to wrap their heads around when they think about even organ donation. just because the dead -- the remains of someone you knew, it looks like that person. it looks like a person. it's not. it's a hull. it's now muscle and tissue and when you're a pathologist, you never knew this person. i could imagine you're a -- respect doesn't enter into the equation after a while. >> host: from "stiff," mary reach writes: many of the

students gave their cadavers names, not like beef jerky. real names. one student introduced know -- known as ben the cadaver who retain his dignity. >> we're talking with mary roach. >> we're'll start ernestine. thanks for holding. >> i have enjoyed the conversation, and like mary, i have planning on donating my body for the met students at the west virginia osteopathic school in lewisburg, and my family, like you've said, is aghast at

me doing this. but i have worked in hospitals for over 56 years, and i feel that it is worthwhile to donate my body to the students. my second comment is, i was in college when masters and johnson's work came out, and it really was the topic of conversation, in the dorm in classes and what have you. so, those are my two comments, and i am enjoying the program. >> guest: thank you very much. that's interesting. masters and -- i just wish i could have talked to some of the people who had volunteered for that -- for the masters and johnson study. i just think it was such a heroic thing to have done at that time. no just marseest and johnson but the people who volunteered to do that. so it's interesting to get the

perspective of somebody who was there then. >> host: dan bridgewater, new jersey, go ahead. >> caller: yes, i -- -- yes, i wanted to point out that -- [inaudible] -- why we are so shy about being seen sexually. we and other animals are shy. ex-creating because it's a time -- secreting -- ex-creating and it's a time when we're really vulnerable and can be attacked. the second thing i would say, a lot of tissue and bodies are not used by anatomy students but used for the salvage tissue and the replacement tissue, and this raises a very technical question about when you're really dead. there is a bias for you being declared dead because they want to the tissue and want to do

something with it. so that's what scares a lot of people also, that you might have revived because you have people revived after 20 minutes of declared -- with no life signs. the last thing i would point out is that, as a medical student, i recall in my country they put the cadavers in bryan and for mad -- for mall dehide for five years, and there was a 12-year-old girl, cadaver, and her face was still radiating. so beautiful. it was hard to imagine she was dead. but when you do pathology, the throwing around of the organs you see is really because even the undertakers, they take out the organs. the organs do not rest in the body and the reason they might get thrown around, it's really hard work. >> host: dan, when and where did

you go to medical school? >> guest: i went to medical school in eastern europe under communism. very primitive and anatomy was two-year course back then, and we did a lot of anatomy. >> host: all right. thank you for calling. let's get a response from mary. >> guest: thank you, dan. i was curious, your comment about people -- there is obviously a great need for organs and tissue but i don't know of any evidence to suggest that the staff, at, say, an icu or wherever the person is being kept oxygenated on the reps rater -- when someone is brain dead or whatever it is, that issue of them rushing the death in order to get the tissue, i don't -- my understanding is that that's not true. the staff at the icu, they're not the people -- they're completely separate from the people who need the tissue and

organs, and the families or the people at the organ donation network. so obviously if the person is brain dead and they're gone, they're legally dead, there's a hope that the family will make the organs available, but in terms of rushing the death, i don't know of any evidence for that. >> host: annett posts on our facebook page: mary roach, i'm almost 70 years cycle i could afford to i would hand your books out on on the street cornes. gum is one of the most entertaining books i have read. had to stop quoting it at the dinner table, however. what is next? >> guest: thank you very much. i just love the image of you out on the street corner handing out -- i'm going to hire you. gorilla marketing. i am looking into something actually -- this weekend i have some meetings. i don't know yet where i'm

going. i'm looking into a possible next book. it gets harder for me over the years. the obvious topics, the mary roachable topics, the obvious ones have been done so it gets a little harder for me to find something. >> host: you're not going to tell us any more than that? >> guest: i'm going to be all coy and secretive. >> host: besides having relations in front of strangers in a lab, what is the first -- what is one of the first trips you took that ed just kind of sat up and said -- when you said, i'm going to medium school or meet with elvis' doctor -- >> guest: the trip that most disturbed ed that made him concerned for my safety, and it was before i did any of these books. it was -- i wrote a column for

salon.com, and said the human body -- similar roachy topics. and one time i was writing about... they start you out in a room with a spider in the neighboring it progressively closer and

closer until you are holding the turn angela or something and there is a term for that like progress of exposure. anyway that's what you do. so with bashful plater you can do something by helping somebody called a pee body. you start out in the kitchen while they are in the bathroom. you say i am in the kitchen. then you move down the hallway and say i am in the hallway. then they say okay that's good. and i never went into the bathroom, but i was telling her and she said what are you doing this afternoon? i said i'm going over to will not creek. i'm going to be a pee buddy. she was like what? do you know who this person is? what are you doing?

it was on one of the bolten boards, the online communities and i found somebody who was hoping to do this and it was very helpful to him i want to say. >> host: next call comes from steve in texas. >> yes, how're you doing. i was just kind of town twisted because i've been listening and i want to compliment you on all of the journey is that even through. it's remarkable that somebody can -- with your qualifications can go through all this and all these different topics about of the cadaver and stuff like that in the research, and i commend you for that. highly. what brought you -- lagat you really started into this?

they branch out and all these different topics. >> good question. it's possible there is something wrong with me. okay, i -- how did i end up -- i'm trying to think where my career went off in this direction. now salon.com is a very early magazine, and it was for the first time you could get a sense of how many people have read your article so both you and your editor could see what got the most. when i was writing this column it was a report to the column first person but research. there were a couple of them that had to do whatever research, not anatomy labs but more expected things and the hit rate on the columns were very high which suggested that it wasn't just me that thought this was interesting but that people have

a fascination and this goes back to what we were talking about that it was taboo around def and a dead bodies so nobody explores that or toxin a straightforward way about. i enjoy tackling those topics and i found that people responded with the topics because everybody dies, everybody has sex, everybody eats but they are the things we would rather and think about. human beings like to think of themselves as minds and personalities and don't want to think of themselves as just another eating animal. we want to kind of turn away from that. so i felt that whole area to be a fascinating one to step into and explore. >> host: when people meet you what is the first topic they want to talk about?

>> guest: it usually depends on which book has just come out. i get asked a lot about -- well, with gulp people bring their own experience. i got a lot of stories about people's personal experiences that seemed panel like a dream they had when someone dies or a ghost stories. i got a lot of personal stories which was fascinating. people tend to want to talk about their digested fish use. sometimes i go on the atm call when radio and they have to make an announcement like mary brooch is not a doctor. and they are like i have an interest in mind -- and test in black or my medication has changed -- i'm not a doctor. so i get a lot of that kind of question.

and with bunk, yeah, a lot of questions about that particular experience that i shared with the few hours earlier. >> host: you are on booktv on c-span2. the author mary roach is our guest. >> caller: i had a friend who donated her body to science and they had so many and later in the that happening is a they cremated and gave the body back to the family so the wishes of the person or not taken care of and a lot of people don't know that that is something that can happen so here is your family that now has to decide whether to find a grave and a very you or take you out to the sea or that kind of thing so a lot of times people don't think about

that and i just wonder. the only experienced i've had we were very upset because of we didn't want an autopsy and that person had been the victim of a crime. in our family everybody has a big ceremony and everything so all of this is new to me so i just wanted to get your thoughts on someone donating and leader finding the missions were not fulfilled. >> that is unusual because normally what happens is if there is a surplus, the institute, the medical school but received them will make them available to other medical schools or even in the case when

i was in san francisco researching still i went to the mortuary college and students were practicing their techniques on a man who donated himself to medical school but ended up at the mortuary college in other words they couldn't use him at the medical schools of the past and on -- it's rare to, quote on quote, waste of body because there is a demand. it must have been an area where there wasn't another facility close by because normally there is an effort because they are so -- it's a precious gift that someone has made and you want to respect the wishes of the family that there is also usually somebody or some institution that could make good use of it so that is an unusual circumstance. >> host: what is going on at the university of tennessee?

>> guest: it is the home of one of the body forms like starbucks now. the original body farm is a facility from the university of tennessee. it is a research facility and what they are doing is studying the decomposition in different environments. for example buried in soil versus sand and water versus the truck of the carvers of the back seat and it doesn't affect the time line. this is where the detectives look at what stage the body is in and then they can work backwards. this body has been decomposing for approximately six weeks so then they can figure out when the person was killed which used

to be hard to do. sometimes you'd be off by decades because it depends a lot on the environment. the weather and how moist things are. that is what they are doing is creating in different environments and seeing how it slows or speeds or affect the process of decomposition. the reason that there is so many of them now is they are cropping up in different ecological -- like a dry climate or a tropical climate so that they can learn about the timeline of the decomposition in the different ecological systems. so there is actually a project going on right now you can go on the web tamim watch there is a pig under water. they are studying what happens to a body underwater. they've got this paid that you have a web cam that comes on

every 50 minutes and i wish i had it for the viewers but what tends to happen is a lot of crabs show up because the like humans as well as crabs so they tend to take care of the body were. the vultures come down and in india there is a -- i think it is outside of what mumbai there is a place where they were put out and i've never been -- i've only heard about that it's kind of similar pity you just let them come in and you become a part of the ecosystem. >> host: rachel posted on the facebook page thank you so much for being an amazing writer i

will read and buy whatever but you want. why do you choose to ride with the space program in packing for mars, and what was your favorite part about researching the book lacks she says she is a recent president of the space coast and florida and in your book gave me a great new perspective of my surroundings. >> guest: that is lovely to year. first hearing it it sounds like a bit of a departure but it's a book about the human body again but in the extraordinary circumstances of space travel because any system or machine the was built on earth that is built to function you put it on zero gravity and it doesn't work the same way and there are all kind of things happening to human beings in orbit in gravity. and i found that fascinating.

and also the way that they came up is years and years ago i wrote a book -- i wrote an article for discover magazine about the neutral tank which is just giant. it's a giant state that will submerge a big piece of the station life-size and the astronauts will put on their space walking suits and they will rehearse the move and the amount of practice that goes into a one or two hour space walk where you are adjusting of the solar panel it is just the amount of everything has been rehearsed and practice it is tremendously fascinating and at the same time it is very human. in the earliest the space lab

before this space station, they had a dinner table which you put something down it floats away. this makes no sense. you can be wherever. it's still the same. so they realize, they took it out when. it's ridiculous. the astronauts demanded that did come back. they say we are human beings at the end of the day when we are done with our jobs and done with our work we want to sit around the table together and eat and be human. so we want a table and chairs. so they brought it back and now it is equipped with velcro and scraps and you can't just put things down on that and there is an orientation, so there are the elements of being human that

although everything is changing you don't really need them, people want them so it's interesting to see what you can take away and how much strangeness of the human spirit can endure before it protests. >> host: robert some of rightly. he said i asked if you thought of being an astronaut was the best or the worst job in the world. "in your sleep deprived and have to perform perfectly or else you don't fly anymore. as soon as you are done with something, ground control is telling you something else to do. the bathroom stinks and you have malae is all the time. you can't open a window, you can't go home or with your family. you can't relax and you are not well paid. can you get a worse job than that? >> guest: i love norman.

people read that quote and why was of two - whether to include that or not because i don't want no -- it is becoming an astronaut. i will tell you why i go on to see this in the book. that is all true but for me i like to go backpacking with my husband we go out to the sierra s we carry it on our sleeping bags and we go out and spend a few days up their. we have friends who say why would you just go on a cruise or europe? the food is horrible. you can't get a good cup of coffee. it's uncomfortable. you are sleeping on the ground. you are a bit by bugs. you get hot and sunburn, your sweaty come you can't wash your clothes. it sounds like a horrible vacation, to which i say that is

true and all that stuff is there but look at where you are. look at where you are. the get your surroundings and there is no one else. it is a privileged feeling of being in this spot where few people have been and there is no one around, and just the perspective and the experience dwarfs all of that minor inconvenience stuff and i think that space travel is uncomfortable. you are stressed out and your body feels weird and the food is bland and all that but who cares. you are in space and floating across the room like superman. you are like a soap bubble looking down on this beautiful planet that is worth. who cares that will let stinks'. it's that kind of thing. >> host: you talk about space walks and the effect they have on the astronauts. what is the effect?

>> guest: the space walking is a term that applies to being outside of the spacecraft. it is just you floating in space. attached by an umbilical usually but not always. in the early jim and i era, there was a lot of hand-wringing about what will -- will live below the mind of the astronaut, will that freed them not to be in this infinite space floating and there is a fear they would become unhinged. in the first and the second space walk ran in the soviet union i think that is right here and what happened though and he didn't want to come back in.

he was a kid being called back to the dinner table and didn't want to come downstairs. keeps saying in a minute. and mission control was getting concerned like he needs to come back in. he is already a minute late and he would be out there with another great image. you need to get out here now and he would finally say okay. i'm coming back and this is the saddest moment of my life and he just loves it out there and he comes back in and they are talking about this experience using a couple hard core military guys in the air force.

they have the sort of almost new age conversation like it was a sort of transcendent amazing experience and that hadn't been -- there was an expectation that would be terror or something worse and other mind would be blown. >> host: by the time i visited the space center the public affairs building said hard hats required and a kind of laws. and a lot of them got thrown my way. they keep a grip on their public image and their less troublesome for employees and contractors to say no to someone like me than to take their chances and see what i write. there are people involved in the human side of space exploration to see value in the unconventional coverage and it is too nice to say no to read the next call comes from houston. hello. please go ahead. >> how are you doing?

>> fine. some life into fascinated with your comments today, and i share your consternation at some of the stories from the bible that i studied when i was young, too and tried to find some sort of a reasonable explanation for some of those things. it seemed almost like a quest. what do you think about the surge that the scientists are undergoing looking for the god particle? >> eni the part of the brain non--- didn't mean to use a technical term. >> precisely, yes. >> well, i have no background in the particle physics. i would sit down across the table from him like explain

matter and i would try to hang in there as long as i could and i would quickly become lost. so i can't really make an intelligent comment on the search for the god particle but it is under way and there might be a better understanding. that is the bulk of what is out there. >> on our facebook page, teresa rights might in-year-old son he is as big a fan of yours as we are. he loved packing for mars and we are currently reading. are your books written for tenniel's? >> guest: they are written for 10-year-olds and 90 and everything in between. thank you. >> we will continue that. when you said you wanted ideas for a new topic, he thought guns

and how they shape what we do and the problems around the world with regulating them would be a good next book. any thoughts on that? >> i agree i think that is a great idea. it's a little -- to think of my random humor applying to the topic of guns is a little challenging but it's an interesting topic and i have thought about that. >> host: michael posts on the facebook page i was surprised when you concluded that the end of spook that you believed in ghosts. the conclusion seems to be at odds with what i found to be very skeptical explanation of the subject. >> guest: i get asked that a lot. the point i was making was i was trying to point up the difference between knowledge and

belief. for me to know what to know that there is a ghost is one thing and to believe it is something else this is the decision that you may get sometimes it is based on how you are brought up and sometimes it is just more fun to believe that in the case of ghosts i just thought it's more fun -- i don't know. i know of no evidence for their existence but it's just i'm willing to believe because it is more fun to believe than to not believe. i was playing around with the difference between belief and knowledge but i don't think that came through very well. and if i had to write the book again i would change the ending somewhat because it sounds like a flip flopped and suddenly she spent her entire book sort of making the case that there isn't a lot of persuasive evidence for this. and then all of a sudden she says i believe in ghosts. but anyway, it came out of the discussion and the and about

knowledge verses believe. >> host: bald is here in washington, d.c.. please go ahead with your comment or question for mary roach. >> caller: i have enjoyed your talk immensely. here's the thing. i'm 70-years-old and by laying out options. i would never give up my alladi for a cadaver -- my body for a cadaver. but i've read where people pay and less service to freeze the body and the head and i gather the people that do this is that there is some possibility that maybe 50 years from now they will find a way to revive your body and i thought they would revive younger ones than older bodies like me. your comment about the

21 centimeters coming you know, who i am and what i am is stored in my brain and the question i have for you is do you have any knowledge of the feasibility of this -- i tend to think it is a puzzle the next 40 or 50 years and in fact recreate you through the brain. and how much does it cost? >> thank you. >> that is the cryopreservation i believe, and you can freeze just the head or the whole enchilada. if you can thaw the hid you can attach it to another body. like you said the brain would be the repository of the self. the challenge with crites yo preservation if i remember the

term exactly right is that it is essential the freezer burn. a single layer or for example sperm you can freeze and fall to the tuesday love and and everything is hunky dory but when you have a structure with millions of liters then it becomes tricky and i don't -- nothing beyond just a single cell as far as i know has been successfully reanimated as it were. but 40 or 50 years down the line who considers a fair and of skepticism that surrounds it because i think right now it is impossible but like you said, who knows what will be possible. you know, even the notion of reattaching the head to the body i looked into in stiff and there

was a researcher who successfully took a head from a hoe and if you can reattach the blood supply and oxygenate the brain it's possible, it would be possible in essence to do a whole body transplant. say you have a really brilliant person and you didn't want their knowledge to disappear, you could in a sense give them a whole new body. the spinal nerves wouldn't be reattached, so the person couldn't move, but you would have a pill on the -- head on a pillow being oxygen needed by a body. at that time the animals lived only a short while partly because the rejection of the immune system tissue but they made such progress that stem cell research and i think that is something actually being able to do a whole body transplant it sounds very frankenstein and

sci-fi but if you could reattach the spinal cord that is something that could be feasible as strange as it seems. so something like that cryopreservation is in that category. but who knows where they will be in 100 or 500 years. >> from stiff barry roach crites br biology and we are reminded of this the beginning of the end at birth and death and in between we do what we can to forget. kent in atlanta. for go ahead. >> caller: its been a delight. i am enjoying every bit of this. i would like to share a couple of things based on ideas and experiences that you have brought back to light. i am in my seventies and i was born about 20 years before and i am of course catholic and the idea of terminating or giving

the body which my wife and i have both done but we grew up where the resurrection of the body and these ideas are still out there, so the work that you are doing and others are really opening up people's minds to the idea of we are a throwaway society and the idea of the good use to be done with is a marvelous idea. one last thing i would like to say is you need a couple of comments that took me back to a meeting i had with a buddhist monk when i was in vietnam in the 60's and you made a comment that was made that is you will never understand when you believe coming and you will never believe what you

understand why. these are two different process these that we comey will all the time. >> before we get a response can i ask is it considered anticatholic to donate your body to science? >> caller: it used to be but it is and now. it was in the 80's i think when my wife -- we went to my wife aunts funeral and the body wasn't there. so it has taken time. each bishop when has to get approval from and i don't know of any in the united states where this approval has been denied. but it takes a long time for traditions 12 falling. and all we have to do is go back and think about the trial. it just takes a long time for us to progress. >> host: are you still a

practicing catholic klaxon >> caller: even to the point that i am hoping to get reconciled. >> caller: with the vatican to was an extraordinary time when cremation began to be allowed because it used to be that there was a requirement that the body be buried. in the vatican, cremation is an interesting story. it took a long time for that to be acceptable. initially it was a barbaric thing. you burn up a body pit how barbaric and horrible. so that was as you said a kind of slow process of acceptance. and the catholic church now accepts cremation. i don't know if this is part of the change, but i am not an

expert on the vatican to. but the requirement is that it's all right as long as you very the remains. so it was a sort of compromise scenario. but it's interesting. when i was working on stiff, i came upon a method of dealing with remains called the water reduction, the tisch you digestion and it's kind of like putting the body in a pressure cooker. it liquefies and you can try that and you get a very sort of tight powder. anyway, and it is used with animals that have disease because the way that it actually destroys apparently. anyway, there is some forward-looking mortician who felt that the digestion would be something that they could offer

and i called up some one from the catholic bishops and i said how do you feel about this process and also about composting because there is a movement for composting bodies and that is something people like that idea of being taken up into a plant material and he said i don't know. i think of it as a garbage and i think of stuff going down the drain as sewage. so i have difficulties with that but he said i can't speak for the church. i feel a little off with the church is something that they would have to look into and it is always evolving with these issues of the body disposition and the cremation of the vatican to was a great example. thank you. >> host: we are halfway

through our interview with author mary roach and plenty of time for your phone calls, comments and e-mails as we continue to a producer on the program is tanya davis and tom yell glisson was a little questionnaire to the author to find out what they are reading and what are their influence is and what are some of their favorite books. she did that with mary roach and here is the response.

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bac y av with author mary roach. some of your influences you write my snowmobile loving fun running vienna sausage eating chicken slot during childhood neighbors. who were they? >> guest: they were my snowmobiling writers. i grew up in a little college town the college was the town, but my folks couldn't afford to live in downtown so we live out a way so i had this upbringing that was very kind of -- i spent most of my time over their riding snowmobiles shooting bb guns watching chickens slaughtered eating spam and then i would go home to my professor

and i was -- i don't know. i ended up being very comfortable in different worlds and communities and not only comfortable but i sort of what i do and what i'm very privileged to do is to step into other worlds for a span of time. the work that i do enables me to step into worlds i would never see. it's a whole other world in the johnson space center and i wouldn't be a will to spend any time they're doing what i do it may be traces back to the joy of stepping back-and-forth between the two very different worlds. >> host: another one of your greatest influences, my dad who is 65 when i was born. >> guest: you don't want to

rush into anything. my dad came over to england. what is the, 119 now. he came over on the lusitania no less and in the irish tradition he was a great storyteller and he talked about coming over on the lusitania and my brother thought that is just one of those stories. he did not. and i drove by on my way in the coming and it was a xerox pasted together because for some years back it was of the xerox book from the lusitania and there was his name and who was going to see how old he was, he had $25 in his pocket and there it was like 15i think it was. like 15i think it was. so there you go.

>> guest: i don't think of was that long. a few weeks. >> host: in one of your books, i think it was spook, as an aside you said your dad drank too much. >> guest: i never thought him as an alcoholic as a kid because he was never staggering around being delicacy and abusive or anything like that, but that 5:00 they would get up the scotch and martini phase with the bidders and then he got lazy. over the years i remember the number of -- it sounds like a word you're not supposed to say. anyway, by the time i graduated

we had three jiggers of scotch. they said you have to cut down on the news but i never saw an effective behavior or thought of that as an issue but i guess if your definition is that you need to have of alcohol every day i suppose that is the definition. >> host: what did your parents do for a living human to and he was a professor. what did he teach? >> guest: he taught speech and he was the assistant manager of the dartmouth players so he was involved in the design and the publicity at the time, some theater. he loved theater. before he met my mother and settled down there was something

that was troubling lectures and talks and he did summer stock. it's amazing you can go online to do that databases and all of the reviews and the descriptions of the play is coming up so from portland to maine and will replace he loved to travel. he had a spirit of adventure and i guess that's why i think of him as an influence. >> host: you mentioned him and bill bryson a couple times. why? >> guest: the ability to seamlessly blended fascinating information with humor, no one does it better.

it is a tremendous writer and never a field turn of phrase. sometimes it is just an example. the bill was describing here and in the u.k. of course it is covered by this cloud of gray color but instead of saying it's a great overhead he said it was like living inside of tupperware sell any mechem he just has a marvelous ability to blend research and fact with fun and humor. >> host: our guest is author mary lou roach with a curious

lives of the human cadaver and the after life and the curious what coupling troubling to the katella calling for mars and life of the blade when and of the elementary canal. for those of you in the mountain and pacific plater, facebook come e-mail, also available as well and this facebook comment comes mary i am a recent graduate and i read before and after starting school and can't describe how to change my perspective on the human body. have you ever thought about writing psychological disorders and even how animals experience these disorders. i'm sure it has been done before but never with your humor and

openness. >> guest: i actually have. thank you very much. i would feel ill will that loss and unsure of my footing. so i have stayed away. i wanted to recommend both topics. this woman as both a physician and a poet. her first book was one body of courage and the gross anatomy and reflections on that and in the next book it is coming out falling into the fire. it's a very reflective one.

it is lack of knowledge of the working of the brain. it's one of those situations where the medical background what kind of challenge me. >> host: christine has appeared on the program. you can watch that and go to c-span.org, tied her name and she will be in the video library if you watch the on line if you are interested. a birthing through the ages and across cultures. >> guest: i have blurb two or possibly three. there is one book called get me out of here which we have the same publisher and i blurb turn them i guess you would say and they were wonderful.

it's a perfect topic for me. i agree but it's been done so well by these two or three authors who i wish i had their names right here. >> host: this is in researching your books. you always t seem to throw yourself in with whatever the subject may be. has there been any point that you felt like you have gone too far? >> there was a point that my editor thought i was going too far, and this was an bonk and i probably won't go into it here because i don't want to get c-span into trouble. but anyway, i guess the answer is yes. there was a small scene and was over in cairo --

>> host: we are table, you can say it. >> guest: he was a wonderful professor who had a tremendous sense of curiosity and he was fascinated by reflexes and sometimes they were the reflexes of sex and things that would happen during intercourse. he said you can come and i will demonstrate in for you. i didn't know how this was going to go but supposedly the risk and be somebody demonstrating a reflex and was a woman, and she had wisely not shown up to work that day so here i was, i traveled all the way to cairo to do this and part of the reason i did this is that he published this story on the effect of polyester on fertility. the way that he did this come he

made little polyester pants for that in the study and there is a figure the under the hand worn by the rat and we could show what peter is having a heart attack over here. i thought this is a man i have to meet, dressing little rats and polyester pants. and by the way because it's hot it does lower your sperm counsel for the record, polyester under were not advised. when i got there, the professor -- i look at him and he's living in beautiful bright blue suit its polyester. i'm like polyester, what are giving? he said yes but underwear, never. so anyway, i thought i have to go and visit this man. and he was going to demonstrate

these reflexes of sexual intercourse. the woman took off and he said i have a man i can demonstrate the reflexes. it raises and lowers via testicles that raises the temperature as we were talking about with fertility. there was one other reflex and this is a medical term by think we can say, it is the anal wink and it's very easy to elicit the anal wink. you basically just scratch on the side, and it winks. my editor felt i had gone a little too far with the winks. and i went on and i believe i said that looking -- we are observing and the doctor is one of those planters so this poor guy that is winking and i had a

memory when i was a kid on easter the sugar and get a little opening would see through and you can see the scene of bunny rabbits inside just looking through the little hole of the egg and my editor crossed out the whole thing and said no one. so the anal wink is gone. >> host: next call from mary roach comes from mod. >> caller: there is a book that i heard of that is called the incoruptables. it said after they die they do not decompose. i was wondering is their anything to this? how well documented is this? and i've also heard this

emanates. >> guest: i'm going to ask you to repeat the second part. but on the incoruptables has and they don't ever decompose clocks because there is a vast avaya of lewicke saints but i don't know of whole nabhan decomposed bodies on display. for example lennon was very carefully embalmed. so it might be beyond my area of expertise that i was fascinated and i have cousins who once told me there is such a thing as forensic and psychology and they figure out for each st, are there 12 figures and if there's to extra, who do they belong to and he went on a long story that my cousin had me into this up,

he was pulling my leg. i even wanted to report upon this and what a wonderful occupation. so i love the intersection of science and religion. i don't dare to write the book because i feel like my take on religion i don't want to stir the pot. but it's a fascinating topic and i touch on that that the indestructible bone and the jewish religion there was a search the renominated and then they try to destroy them and they were easy to destroy since they crossed that off the list. but anyway, so the notion of being incorruptible isn't unique to the catholic church. what was the second part?

>> when they are open that there is a pleasant scent. >> guest: embalming fluid, maybe. >> host: what does it smell like? >> guest: it sells like from all the hype, very heavy. sometimes in allow up 82 -- infil lab they will take it away and it's a very strong and unpleasant odor. >> host: mehdi you are on book tv. please go ahead. >> caller: i have enjoyed the discussion so much. i have a question about is their eighth the genre of anatomy and physiological -- i am thinking of two books. one is a children's book called

everybody were poops were. i wonder if you talk to other authors that do the kind of writing that you do because it makes it so accessible to people >> guest: there should be a conference of taguba writers like me. i don't know who wrote everybody poops but we should get together and hang out because i don't know any of these folks and i don't know that there is a name for the genre. it's a small but from group. >> host: she has been on the progress and if you would like to watch that you can go to booktv.org woo and tight in the doctor's name and you will be able to watch that in that

interview that we did. this is an e-mail from ellen. you're favorite included in the amazing adventures. how have these influenced your writing or your life as an author? >> guest: the amazing adventures hasn't influenced me in any way other than to make me had -- hang my head in shame i can even call myself a writer. if he's writing that i'm doing something else. it's just amazing what he does with language and stories, not a specific influence. i suppose any time you read someone that is that extraordinary it is a inspiration and a push to do better and try harder to sue any time reading someone like that

were. it's just beautifully crafted and just the thinking and other writing and reporting of a beautifully executed and a reminder to keep trying harder. >> host: what are you reading this summer? >> guest: a collection of short stories called irish girl which is dark but also amazing and also a collection of essays mostly about travel. jeff is a british writer so on the plane here i was reading cuyahoga for people who can't be bothered to do it which is one of the names of the stories in the collection and i am also about to start a new book which

was fascinating on a novel called snapper. that is next up so that is sort of what is on my list right now. >> host: bob from massachusetts e-mails my favorite book of yours is my plan that. how did the "reader's digest" column come out and will you write more of them? >> guest: that column came about years and years ago i wrote for a magazine called hypocrisy which morphed into various other titles. early on at least it was a wonderful magazine to write for and i did some of my -- was my first feature writing experience. the publisher of that magazine was a gentleman that then went on to become i think the ceo at the "reader's digest" and he contacted me about writing a humor column because i had done

one for hippocrates roi stitches. he recruited me to do a column for the "reader's digest" and sadly my mother was not alive to see that happen because the thing that would have excite her the most would be for me to have a regular feature in the "reader's digest." it's different from the books in that is my day-to-day life. there is no science and at that it was very fun to write. at a certain point the magazine leadership changed. they didn't want to have the koln anymore. so i don't tell. it would be fun to do another column at some .1. we were .. what