Review of reviews:?Books

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex

by Mary Roach

(Norton, $24.95)

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Leonardo da Vinci held a dim view of sex. “Copulation,” he once said, “is awkward and disgusting.” His attitude, writes author Mary Roach, didn’t prevent him from studying human genitalia in some detail. Yet Leonardo was an outlier in the history of sex research. Well into the 20th century, Roach says, other scientific pioneers were so squeamish about studying the mechanics of human sex that even leaders in the field resorted to extrapolating from the observed mating habits of small woodland animals. Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey famously pushed science beyond many old inhibitions in the 1950s, but barriers remain. If a scientist today isn’t interested in developing a new Viagra, says Roach, obtaining funding can be a problem.

Roach is an unusually entertaining science writer, said Pamela Paul in The New York Times. In her best-known book, Stiff, she took a close look at the myriad fates of cadavers and made facing death fun. In Bonk, she finds deep comedy in a potentially titillating topic. Part of her trick is that she’s “interested less in scientific subjects than in the ways scientists study their subjects.” She’s without doubt a “bold, tenacious” reporter, ready to crisscross the globe to scrutinize various research frontiers. But she’s also winningly amused by goofy scholarly jargon or the idea of couples trying to get it on while they’re wired like marionettes to various monitoring devices.

“In answer to your question,” said Jon Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle, yes, Roach became a test subject herself. When she reached out to a London scientist who had found a way to capture ultrasound images of human genitalia in the act of sexual congress, he was forced to admit that he had yet to locate any volunteers. Roach and her saintly husband stepped in. Rest assured, said Elizabeth Bachner in Bookslut.com, this will not be one of the moments in Bonk that will gross you out. Though Roach is always tasteful, she eagerly provides graphic descriptions of pig insemination or penis surgery, because doing so brings out the absurdity of sex and our abiding interest in it. In Bonk, “all of us come across as ridiculous, but not unlovable.”

The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea

by Charles Robert Jenkins, with Jim Frederick

(Univ. of Calif., $24.95)

Charles Robert Jenkins was a young U.S. Army sergeant stationed along the Korean demilitarized zone in 1965 when he made a fateful mistake. The North Carolina native, already anxious about facing hostile fire, felt certain he was about to be transferred to Vietnam. After downing 10 beers one night before beginning his patrol, he abandoned his unit and walked due north into the waiting arms of the North Korean army. His hope was that he would shortly be sent back to the U.S. in a Cold War prisoner exchange, facing court-martial at worst. “I did not understand,” he says now, “that the country I was seeking temporary refuge in was literally a giant, demented prison.” He spent the next 38 years in its grip.

Jenkins’ slim new memoir about his life in captivity proves “oddly compelling,” said The New Yorker. Jenkins was a semi-literate country boy when he went AWOL, and “the blank ordinariness of his character brings out the moral and physical ugliness of life” in Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. It was a place where his minders had to steal or beg for their own food, a place where Jenkins could see a dog digging up a fresh mass grave on one day and learn the next that all the dogs in the neighborhood had since been shot.

Jenkins suffered malnutrition, occasional beatings, and relentless brainwashing attempts, said Gabriel Schoenfeld in The Wall Street Journal. But being a “Cold War trophy” also brought odd privileges. In 1980, the North Koreans forced a young Japanese woman they had kidnapped to live with him, and they encouraged him to rape her. Jenkins instead treated her kindly, and the couple married soon after, raising two children under government watch. It was the efforts of the Japanese government that finally won the whole family’s freedom, said Graeme Wood in TheAtlantic.com. In 2004, Jenkins publicly apologized for his cowardice, but claimed that the ordeal he suffered as a consequence had been worth it. His “weird” little book, you see, is really “a valentine in disguise.” Its achievement, or at least the achievement of Jenkins’ co-author, is the book’s “simple evocation of the emotional space Jenkins and his bride claimed for themselves under the cruel gaze of the Kims.”