Grunt by Mary Roach

 

I grabbed this because I noticed it when I was walking through my local library's nonfiction section, and Ms. Roach is always interesting--and I was curious what sorts of science she'd found to write about. Turns out there was much in the way of medical science, both in the sense of treatment and in the sense of prevention, as well as digressions into intentional bad smells and the effect of sleep on cognition, not to mention things like how one armors a vehicle against IEDs and how much of one's situational awareness (at least in an actual combat or combat-adjacent context) is based on hearing. Ms. Roach writes with bucketloads of life and sparkle, and can apparently get almost anyone to talk with her, and the combination of their expertise and her viewpoint (sometimes playing up her ignorance, at least in the telling) and her prose makes for a powerfully readable book.