WHO GIVES A POOP?

A biologist digests her own observations and those of other researchers studying poop’s properties, products, and potential.

“Once I put my poo goggles on,” the author writes, “I found fecal fun everywhere.” Picking up more or less where her Something Rotten: A Fresh Look at Roadkill (2018) left off, Montgomery continues to convey her devotion to decomposition with breezy visits to labs and landfills, conversations with scat specialists, and thoroughly detailed up-close and personal notes on encounters with dead animals, guts, and writhing intestinal fauna. Piling evocative chapter heads like “Hunk of Tongue” and “Stool to Fuel” atop essays redolent with puns and double-entendres, she adds unusual nuggets of insight to her disquisitions on fertilizers and fecal transplants: the significant role dinosaurs and other prehistoric “megapoopers” played in seed dispersal, hints that certain parasitic worms may be as good for us as certain species of intestinal bacteria, and the notion that artificially preserving endangered species isn’t automatically a good thing. Along with occasional diversions to, for instance, point out the environmental impact of palm oil’s near ubiquity in our food and consumer goods, she further indulges her wide range of interests in footnotes on nearly every page and a closing resource list bulging with analytical commentary. Neither the scanty assortment of photos nor Gottlieb’s decorative pen-and-ink vignettes include human figures.

A well-stirred slurry of facts and fun for strong-stomached “poop sleuths.”