Bonk!

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With Bonk, best-selling author Mary Roach turns her insatiably curious eye toward one of the most elusive subjects in science: sex. She asks both outrageous and practical questions (Would you have a testicle transplant? Is vaginal orgasm a myth?) and addresses topics as varied as the mental/physical arousal divide and the link between pleasure and fertility. The Los Angeles Time says Bonk is “rich in dexterous innuendo, laugh-out-loud humor and illuminating fact. It’s compulsively readable.”

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The Bottom Line

From the useful to the absurd, Mary Roach’s Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex highlights the ways science can shed light on human sexuality.

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I. Introduction

From the useful to the absurd, Mary Roach’s Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex highlights the ways science can shed light on human sexuality. She investigates what a pig’s orgasms might teach us about fertility and asks questions about the practice of grafting tissue from monkey testicles onto humans to improve male virility. With these examinations and more, Roach gives readers a behind-the-scenes look into how sex researchers do their work.

Roach makes clear from the start that the pairing of science with sex is limited, acknowledging that there’s so much about sex that science will never be able to explain. After all, sex involves a unique mix of hormones, emotions, and passions that no lab could ever capture exactly. And yet, as she shows in this New York Times bestseller, scientists haven’t stopped trying.

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II. Understanding the Female Orgasm

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III. A Pleasure-Fertility Link?

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IV. New Thinking on Erectile Dysfunction

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V. Strange-but-True Transplants

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VI. Arousal — A Physical and Mental Divide

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VII. The Powerful Role of Hormones

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