User:Misschrisparker/Mary Roach

Mary Roach is an author, specializing in popular science. Raised in Etna, New Hampshire, she received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Wesleyan University in 1981. Before Roach wrote books, she was a columnist, copy editor, and also worked in PR for a brief time. She currently resides in Oakland, California. To date, she has published four books: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005) (published in some markets as Six Feet Over: Adventures in the Afterlife), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008) and Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010).

Early Life
After college, Roach moved out to San Francisco, CA and spent a few years working as a freelance copy editor. From there, her writing career began while working part-time at the San Francisco Zoological Society, producing press releases on topics such as elephant wart surgery. On her days off from the SFZS, she wrote freelance articles for the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Magazine.

From 1996 - 2005 Roach was part of The Grotto, a San Francisco based project and community of working writers and filmmakers. It was in this community, that Roach would get the push she needed to break into book writing. While being interviewed by Alex C. Telander, of BookBanter, Roach answers the question of how she got started on her first book, "A few of us every year [from The Grotto] would make predictions for other people, where they'll be in a year. So someone made the prediction that, 'Mary will have a book contract.' I forgot about it and when October came around I thought, I have three months to pull together a book proposal and have a book contract. This is what literally lit the fire under my butt."

Career
In 1986, she sold a humor piece about the IRS to the San Francisco Chronicle. That piece led to a number of humorous first-person essays and feature articles for such publications as Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Discover Magazine, National Geographic, Outside Magazine, and Wired. She has also written several articles for Salon.com, she wrote reviews for tech gadgets at Inc.com, and has also had an article published in the Journal of Clinical Anatomy. Roach also had monthly columns in Reader’s Digest (“My Planet”) and Sports Illustrated for Women, (“The Slightly Wider World of Sports”).

Besides being a best selling author, Roach is involved in many other projects on the side. Roach reviews books for The New York times and was the guest editor of the Best American Science and Nature Writing's 2011 edition. She also serves as a member of the Mars Institute's Advisory Board and was recently asked to join the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

Personal Life
Mary Roach was born in Hanover, New Hampshire. Later her family would move to Etna, New Hampshire, where Roach attended Hanover High School.

Roach has an office in downtown Oakland and lives in the Glenview neighborhood of Oakland with her husband Ed Rachles, who is an illustrator and graphic designer. Roach also has two step-daughters.

While it’s clear that Roach has a wide variety of somewhat unusual interests, her interest is not limited to observation alone. While researching material for her book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Roach came across Dr. Jing Deng, a University College London Medical School senior lecturer in medical physics. Dr. Deng was experimenting with 4-D ultrasound imaging and was in need of test subjects to engage in intercourse while wearing the ultrasound equipment so that real-time images could be captured. Roach and her husband Ed were the first willing participants in this study. When asked how she was able to convince her husband to participate, Roach said, “He’s crazy supportive. It was much harder for him, it was nothing for me. I was just a receptacle. I was just taking notes.”

While Roach has often been quoted saying that she doesn't have much free time between writing books, something she is very fond of is backpacking and travel, the latter is something she has been able to do a great deal of while doing research for her articles and books; to that end, Roach has been able to visit all seven continents twice. Roach has been to Antarctica a few times as part of the National Science Foundation's Polar Program; her Antarctic trip in 1997 was taken to write an article for Discover Magazine on meteorite hunting, with meteorite hunter Ralph Harvey.

Awards and Recognition
In 1995, her article entitled, "How to Win at Germ Warfare " was a National Magazine Award Finalist. In this article, we learn the disturbing fact that bacteria and virus particles become aerosolized upon flushing your toilet. Roach learns from microbiologist, Chuck Gerba, of the University of Arizona, that, "Upon flushing, as many as 28,000 virus particles and 660,000 bacteria [are] jettisoned from the bowl.

In 1996, her article on earthquake-proof bamboo houses, "The Bamboo Solution" took the American Engineering Societies' Engineering Journalism Award, in the general interest magazine category. In this article we learn from, Jules Janssen, a civil engineer, that Bamboo is "stronger than wood, brick, and concrete...A short, straight column of bamboo with a top surface area of 10 square centimeters could support an 11,000-pound elephant."

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers was a New York Times Bestseller, a 2003 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, and one of Entertainment Weekly's Best Books of 2003. Stiff also won the Amazon.com Editor's Choice award in 2003, was voted as a Borders Original Voices book, and was the winner of the Elle Reader's Prize. Stiff has been translated into 17 languages, including Hungarian (Hullamerev) and Lithuanian (Negyveilai). Stiff, was also selected for Washington State University's Common Reading Program in 2008-09.

Roach's column "My Planet" (Reader's Digest) was runner-up in the humor category of the 2005 National Press Club awards. Roach's second book, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, was the recipient of the Elle Reader's Prize in October 2005. Spook was also listed as a New York Times Notable Books pick in 2005, as well as a New York Times Bestseller. In 2008, Roach's book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, was chosen as the New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, it was in The Boston Globe's Top 5 Science Books, and was also listed as a bestseller in several other publications.



In 2011, Roach's book, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, was chosen as the book of the year for the 7th annual One City One Book: San Francisco Reads literary event program. Packing for Mars was also 6th on the New York Times Best Seller list.

In 2012, Roach was the recipient of the Harvard Secular Society's Rushdie Award, which is the award for outstanding lifetime achievement in cultural humanism. The same year, she received a Special Citation in Scientific inquiry from Maximum Fun.org.

Style
While some people might not see any connection between the topics that Roach chooses to write about and while some might falsely assume she’s obsessed with death – dead bodies in Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and life after death in Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife – the common theme throughout all 4 of her books is actually the human body. Roach tells us, “My books are all [about the human body], Spook is a little bit of departure because it’s more about the soul rather than the flesh and blood body, but most of my books are about human bodies in unusual circumstances.” When asked by Peter Sagal, of NPR, specifically how she picks her topics, she said, "Well, its got to have a little science, it's got to have a little history, a little humor - and something gross." You can often find Roach saying that she doesn’t have a science degree, at least not in the “hard sciences” but that doesn’t stop her from acting as our “ambassador to the world of science” as Robynn “Swoopy” McCarthy says, in her Skepticality interview with Roach.

It may be true that Roach doesn’t possess a science degree, but she is highly skilled at taking what might normally read as dull facts and figures and turns it into not only something that the average reader can understand, but also takes the reader with her every step of the way, from learning about the material to learning about the interesting people who study it. As Burkhard Bilger of The New Yorker puts it, Mary Roach is, “the funniest science writer in the country.”  According to Roach, “Make no mistake, good science writing is medicine. It is a cure for ignorance and fallacy. Good science writing peels away the blindness, generates wonder, and brings the open palm to the forehead: ‘Oh! Now I get it!’”  The following quote from the introduction in her book Spook, shows us that Roach has a healthy level of skepticism about the world around her and that is something that is very evident in the pages of her books and even in the “obsessive” way that she researches her topics. “Flawed as it is, science remains the most solid god I’ve got. And so I’ve decided to turn to it, to see what it had to say on the topic of life after death. Because I know what religion says, and it perplexes me. It doesn’t deliver a single, coherent, scientifically sensible or provable scenario… Science seemed the better bet.”

Articles
Category:Living people Category:American science writers Category:American medical writers Category:Magazine writers Category:Wesleyan University alumni

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