Bonk by Mary Roach

Would it sound terribly weird if I said that I read this book about the scientific study of sex because it was recommended by my new (female) boss?

Thought so -- but that's the truth. She's been reading it for the last few weeks, and mentioned it several times -- so, when I saw it in the library, I picked it up.

Roach is a science writer, so her angle on sex is through science -- she reports on various contemporary (and a few historical) researchers doing serious work, often despite the scorn of their colleagues, on various aspects of human sexual physiology. There are chapters on Masters & Johnson's penis camera, MRIs of couples in coitus, and quite a few on impotence of one sort or another.

Roach tries not to be titillating, but she is a wry and highly readable writer, so Bonk is a pleasure to read. (Just not the kind of pleasure you would expect from a book about sex.) I did find her chapter transitions a bit distracting -- she generally teases or leads in to the subject of the next chapter at the end of the previous one. (And that's a strategy I hadn't seen before in a nonfiction book -- or, at least, I'd never noticed it before, which is nearly the same thing.)

To say much more about Bonk would be to get into the details, and I'm not feeling terribly smutty at the moment. So let me just say that it's a solid work of science popularization by a writer who is ever willing to follow her research and ask the next question.