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Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
Grunt The Curious Science of Humans at War
Author: Mary Roach
Best-selling author Mary Roach explores the science of keeping human beings intact, awake, sane, uninfected, and uninfested in the bizarre and extreme circumstances of war. Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier?s most challenging adversaries?panic, exhaustion, heat, noise?and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them....  more »
ISBN-13: 9780393245448
ISBN-10: 0393245446
Publication Date: 6/6/2016
Pages: 256
Edition: 1
Rating:
  • Currently 4.1/5 Stars.
 9

4.1 stars, based on 9 ratings
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback, Audio CD
Members Wishing: 31
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I needed another good book to dispatch to the old soldiers' home and so didn't have time to more than glance at it, but thank Ashley Bidwell of Whitney, Texas, for fulfilling our wish. I am fifty years away from my service in the Signal Corps during the Cold War in West Germany and our training and equipment were more like that of the vets of WWI and WWII that I knew so many of, than today's service. Much of the book is about technical advances (which I read of in Air Force Magazine, The Economist, etc.) but Ms. Roach has not lost her trademark spin. In Chapter 14 she shares with readers 'how the dead help the living stay that way.' "In military autopsies, medical hardware is examined alongside the software of organs and flesh. The idea is to provide feedback to the men and women who worked on these patients. Did, say, the new supraglottic airway device work the way then manufacturer promised? Was it placed correctly? Could anything have been done differently? The feedback happens via a montly combat mortality teleconference, part of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System program Feedback to the Field. In the past, solid, quantified feedback took the form of published papers. In the time it takes to have a study peer-reviewed and published in a medical journal, a lot of lives can be lost. This is so much better."
Bibliography. No index (so I reduced my evaluation by one star).


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