Mary Roach eBooks

Mary Roach is an American author of popular science books. Born in 1959 in New Hampshire, she studied psychology at Wesleyan University. After graduating, she moved to California, where she worked as a copy editor, columnist, and publicist for the San Francisco Zoological Society.

Her writing career began in 1986, when she sold her first humor piece to the San Francisco Chronicle. She then wrote pieces for magazines such as Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and Salon.com. A column for Salon led her to the publication of her first book, Stiff.

Published in 2003, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers was a New York Times best seller and was on a number of best books lists that year. Her second book, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, was published in 2005. It was a best seller and earned Roach her second Elle Reader’s Prize.

Roach has said that all of her books are about the general theme of the human body. Her third book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, was also a best seller, topping the San Francisco Chronicle’s list and placing in the New York Times top ten.

In 2011, Roach published Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. The book, which investigates what happens to the human body in space by looking at space simulations, was her fourth New York Times best seller.

Roach continues to write, and in 2012 was given the Harvard Secular Society’s Rushdie Award for her achievements in cultural humanism.