It must be challenging to be someone like Mary Roach. You start with Stiff, a book about what happens to our bodies when we die. Then you move onto Spook, about what happens to our souls when we die. Then you take a bit of a left turn for Bonk, about the science about how life begins. Okay, that makes sense.

And then what? Packing for Mars, about life in space. Okay, that fits in, sort of… Gulp, about digestion, okay, okay, but we can make a case for that.

Grunt, humans at war. Uh… and now Fuzz… about “animal”¹ law-breakers. What is she going to do next?

But I have to say, I’ve enjoy these diversions² and explorations of things I wouldn’t usually think about.

Roach’s books share some shared qualities: they’re easy to read, you learn from them, and she reframes how you think about life or death or space or the conflict between nature and humans.

Chapter 7, for example, talks about trees that kill people. Yes, they fall on us in windstorms or when loaded down with ice. Or the Durian drops heavy fruit on people and The End. Or perhaps, Chapter 8, which talks about poisonous plants that people use to take each other out, Rosary Peas and Castor Beans and the such, and their use in war and terror.

Other chapters detail animals on the road, humans trying to wipe out huge flocks of birds and sometimes succeeding; the apprehension of cougars that hunt humans and bears that break into suburban homes; the danger of encroaching elephants; and leopards who become man-eaters.

There was a tale I heard once – I think it was from the colonial days and I’m pretty sure my knowledge of it predates this book – about a group of Indian pilgrims who were had bedded down together in a huge shelter along the road, one of those places that pilgrims stop together. They lay down for the night, the room so full that a man couldn’t walk across the floor without stepping on someone, and soon fell asleep. The next morning a woman, surrounded by the others in the middle of the room, was gone, just a bloody scrap of clothing left behind, snatched by a leopard who silently entered through a cracked-open window, crept through the room so delicately and silently that none of the sleepers awoke, killed her and carried her away with no one the wiser until the morning.

I’ve been keeping an eye on something she mentions here: the overpasses they’ve been building for animals around the world, to help them cross highways without getting struck, designed to seem an extension of the landscape and so, encourage use. Recently I’ve also become interested in other work, where wildlife and railway authorities are experimenting with different sounds to warn animals off the track when trains are approaching. (One, in Norway, tested sirens and klaxons, shots, and barking wolves and found that the one that worked best was one that they had designed to warn off two-legged trespassers: an authoritative voice declaring something along the lines that, “You are in a dangerous area and must step back.” The moose are smart enough to recognize that the predator most threatening to them is us.)

Monkeys, cougars, gulls, rats, mice, and invasive species like rabbits and cats that are wiping out penguins and other ground-nesting birds. She spans the gamut.

Strengthsfinder tells me that I have the strength of “Input” which they describe as a collector mentality. When I first heard that, I immediately thought of my husband’s wall of Snoopys³, and my grandmother’s souvenir spoons or my mother’s collection of rare seashells.⁴ Aside from collections of books, I despise collections⁵. But someone pointed out that I am a collector of information (“a compendium of useless information” I usually call it).

Bless you, Mary Roach, for being the same – and then finding a way to share what you learn with the rest of us.

1. Roach says “nature” and starts the book off with a story about caterpillars who were brought to a court of law in the 17th Century. ↩︎
2. What is the word I’m thinking about – it’s not really diversions and it’s not divinations… Hm. It will come to me in the middle of the night. ↩︎
3. Which I told him we should, instead of sprinkling them throughout the apartment, consolidate them together in a curated display in our guest room. Which worked fine until the guest room became my home office and the Snoopys form my background image. Well, it breaks the ice. ↩︎
4. Do not, I beg of you, collect these things assuming that your children will want them or consider them an investment. They are not an investment. They are an albatross. ↩︎
5. Though I do have a soft spot for Snoopy, I do wish we didn’t also collect bicycles and scuba equipment and photography equipment and cookware and cookbooks, so many cookbooks, so many… ↩︎