Our most consistently entertaining science journalist wanders into the "corners and crannies" of military technology. Roach goes where other writers wouldn't dare (witness her classic take on cadavers, Stiff), here eyeing "the parts no one makes movies about—not the killing but the keeping alive." And her search produces images—a kind of technopoetry—that are hard to forget: a cannon firing chickens into airplanes, urethra replacement surgery, a "brief history of stink bombs."
