Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Book Review: Mary Roach should write more!
Summary: 5 Stars
I have been a big fan of Mary Roach since I read Stiff...She did not disapoint in Bonk. I was laughing out loud within the first few pages and squirming the next few pages. I love how she tells you the history of things...yet keeps it intresting with little facts that would make the most open sexual person squirm. Yet you still look at her as a writer not some perv. I have already recommended this book to a bunch of people! Book Review: Kudos to Mary for the subject and for the humor, shame on her for the superficial treatment of the subject
Summary: 3 Stars
Sexuality is a very important part of human life, that much most of us will agree with. Our history with sexuality, however, has been plagued with some of the worst behaviors the human kind can showcase: prejudice, shame and and overall desire to control it, to keep it locked.
The history of studying sexuality very much reflects the prejudice with which society has historically approached sex itself. This is something that you can get by looking at Mary Roach's Bonk. The book is funny if you like Mary's witty writing and it is filled witrh interesting facts and factoids about the men and women that have the courage to venture studying the physiological aspects of sexuality.
However, where the books falls awfully short is in making a more comprehensive job in the subjects presented. In many areas it feels like a university paper that relies too much on Google as its main source. In some others it feels like her limited sources places her in the brink of ridicule (e.g. stating that human male average time between penetration and orgasm is two minutes). Additionally in many of her examples she is not talking about actual scientific experiments, but about con artists that exploited people's desire for a better sexual life. She does not do a good job calling out the scientists from the impostors.
Book Review: Let's Talk About Sex...in Every Possible Way
Summary: 4 Stars
Mary Roach seems to have made a habit of authoring one-word titled books about science-related trivia that are intent on tickling as well as enlightening us. 2003's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers reveals what happens to a body after death, and 2005's Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife tackles the afterlife and the existence of souls. Her latest tome provides another outlet for her witty, sometimes maddening observations, and it does have the extra titillation factor of being about sexual research with herself as the primary subject. For the most part, she ventures forward from the point of no return, The Kinsey Report, but she uses the occasional reference to the ancient Greeks to validate a point. The author's approach is intriguing as she examines less the scientific subject and instead places more emphasis on the ways scientists study their subjects. This style is surprisingly compatible with a deep-dive discussion of sex, and she has a good time using medical euphemisms and scholarly jargon like "vaginocavernosus reflex" and "nocturnal penile tumescence monitoring" to add some levity to her points.
For the most part, the 319-page book is a congenial entertainment as Roach delves into centuries of research, both scientific and otherwise, into sex among human beings and other beasts. Beginning most appropriately with a chapter called "Foreplay" (versus the typical Foreword), she guides us on a quest that takes us through the human body and the most intimate recesses of our minds. To the author, nothing is sacred. Roach goes beyond merely watching a variety of sexual acts and experiments regardless of whether they take place in the laboratory or not. She interviewed dozens of people, many renowned specialists in fields as unusual as microsurgical potency reconstruction; examined lots of heretofore confidential documents; took a tour of a Danish pig farm to explore the female orgasm's relationship to fertility; and watched sows get artificially inseminated by hand. She has no qualms about becoming an experimental subject herself and volunteered to make love with her husband while their insides were being observed by ultrasound. His inducement was an expense-paid trip to Europe where the research took place.
Sometimes, Roach's curiosity is too overwhelming, and her enthusiasm becomes less contagious and more unctuous as the later chapters attest. Her zealous tone can get alienating when she doesn't think too much about the context of her comments, for example, discussing how an erection can be compared to nasal congestion in the middle of a discourse about major penis surgery. One can only surmise that the marginalia distracts her from the more macro-level discussion this book could have addressed, such as how and when society moved from a repressive viewpoint regarding sex to one that thrives on liberation and personal pleasure. Roach is onto something here, as we tend to have a reflexive suspicion that sex researchers must be voyeurs by nature, perhaps because of our own pangs of jealousy and envy over the acts they are watching performed. Avoidance of the voyeur label is why most of them describe sex in the dullest possible way. However, Roach most definitely does not have that concern. In fact, if anything, she could calm down a bit and let the research speak for itself.
Book Review: Can You Say, "Gee Whiz!"? I Think You Can!
Summary: 3 Stars
As a psychologist and sex therapist, I pounced on this book when I saw it. I should have been more excited--after all, although I was not named, the debate on testosterone that I was part of is mentioned in the book. But the book had this sort of "gee, whiz" quality that, to me, degrades the earnest study of human sexuality. No one thinks it's weird that scientists study the esophagus, the bladder, or the colon. Why is it so weird to study the organs of pleasure and reproduction? I wish the book had either been genuinely funny, or genuinely serious. Not a bad book, just an average one on a very primal, important topic. Book Review: Bonking Made Boring
Summary: 1 Stars
The information, such as it is, in this book is mostly trivial and/or useless. There is also not that much of it. The actual amount of info in the book might have made a long magazine article but no more. The book is shamelessly padded on almost every page with endless jokes and cutesy side remarks, found both in the text and in anecdotes in textual footnotes (the sole purpose for which the book uses footnotes). Since they often have nothing to do either with the book's subject or the material on the page at hand, they quickly become first disruptive and then irritating. A few are funny. More would be funny on their own but fail as irrelevant asides. Some are just stupid. The footnote on page 31 ending with former President Millard Fillmore's last words is an example of both irrelevance and idiocy. So also the one on page 263 that reveals that nominations for the Nobel prize are secret for 50 years so "make the claim, and nobody can prove otherwise until after you're dead. Add one to your resume today." The cutesy remarks in the main text can be found on virtually every page. Not a very well written book, not a very informative book, not a good book.