Gory Details

Adventures from the Dark Side -of Science

Erika Engelhaupt National Geographic 2021 Hb, £18.99, 304pp, ISBN 9781426220975

Erika Engelhaupt is a brave woman to venture into the “quirky stories about gross science” territory staked out so successfully by Mary Roach with books such as Stiff (about death) and Bonk (about sex), but she makes a pretty good fist of it. Derived from her long-running National Geographic

blog, Gory Details

takes a tour through the more unsavoury fringes of science, asking the questions we’d all like to but perhaps wouldn’t dare, each excursion briskly rounded up in a half-dozen or so entertaining and occasionally stomach-turning pages.

There are a good few old favourites that FT readers will recognise, such as the mysterious flurry of severed feet turning up inside trainers on Vancouver beaches. These, it turns out, are a good deal less mysterious or sinister than they might first appear. A combination of coastal geography, physics, scavenger behaviour and trainer design create a perfect storm that regularly deposits disarticulated feet on the local shore. This epitomises her approach – an eye-catching question, an incisive exploration of the crucial bits of science, and a satisfying conclusion wrapped up in gently amusing prose.

Standout tales include a look at whether pets really do eat their dead owners, given the chance, and what actually happens when you pee in a public swimming pool. As it turns out, yes, pets do eat their owners, but it’s more likely to be dogs than cats, although she turns up one case of a man-eating hamster, and that there really isn’t a chemical that turns red when you urinate in the public baths; that one is an urban legend. However, it turns out that looking into the matter opens a rich seam of slightly disconcerting science which certainly makes me wonder if it’ll ever be safe to go back in the water.

Meanwhile, this volume is definitely finding a place on the toilet bookshelf.

Ian Simmons