Kyahgirl

2.75/5 B-This book started out really well for me and I thought it was going to be a winner. In fact, I read about the first third of the book before it started to get stale. However, the last part of the book was much better than the middle. I really liked the presentation of sexuality research information, both from different times in history and the present day. There were many interesting points brought up. Roach states in the introduction that this book is, in part, a tribute to the intrepid scientists who had the courage to experiment, study, and document in a field that is often reviled or ridiculed. I think she accomplished that goal. Mary Roach can be very funny. The things that made me laugh the most at the beginning of the book were her dry, somewhat sarcastic asides. These were mostly in the form of short footnotes. Unfortunately, these became more frequent and longer as the book progressed, such that the author was telling a lengthy 'story' in many of the footnotes and this became a real detriment to the flow of the book. All,in all though I had quite a few laughs while reading this book and that is always a good thing. If you've ever seen a show about primitive farming techniques where they show several people 'tossing' a rough grain mixture on a tarp and letting the chaff blow away you'll know what I mean when I say this process should have been applied to this book. There is some interesting work presented here and I did learn quite a few things about physiology, sexuality, and, uh, Danish pig farmers. However, there is a lot of irrelevant story telling and 'scene description' that detracted. One thing I noted, is that the chapters dealing with male specific sexual issues, were more heavily laced with jokes and 'funny' asides. As though the author was not completely comfortable. The chapters that were more specific to female anatomy and sexuality didn't seem to have this problem. Probably the best chapters in the book were near the end where the author documents some of the current work on studying orgasms and people who either have spinal injuries or a disease,like MS, that can interfere in the bodies ability to have orgasms. There is a lot of evidence that the body can work around the injury and make new pathways (and that all nerves involved in sexual response are not going through the spine).The Bibliography is not extensive but there are enough references there that an interested person could find out more about some of the topics in the book if they wanted to pursue it. I have read many, many good reviews of other works by this author and I intend to check them out.