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.