The wave : in pursuit of the rogues, freaks, and giants of the ocean, by Susan Casey, is so much more interesting than one might think, based on the title. If you read her previous book, The Devil’s Teeth,  about great white sharks and the people who research them, you know how she can take a seemingly obscure topic and make it come alive. She does the same here, whether she’s talking to the numbers-people from Lloyd’s of London (who still insure boats and cargo on the high seas), meteorologists and storm predictors, physicists who study waves of all kinds, or people who salvage tankers that are about to go down. They’re all saying the same thing: the environment is changing, seas are changing, storms are getting worse and waves are getting bigger–even catastrophic–on a more regular basis.

Casey goes around the world to track these waves down, or to view evidence of their destructive power, landing in England, Tahiti, Alaska, South Africa, Mexico, California, and Hawaii. She ends up spending a great deal of time with several big-wave surfers (most notably Laird Hamilton). They experience the waves in a way that few other people do, for good and bad, and by choice. Their stories will either make you want to learn to surf, or convince you that it’s about the last thing you ever need to do.

Ultimately, though, the story here belongs to the sea and the waves. They seem to have a life of their own, behaving in ways that are sometimes predictable, other times completely off the charts, sometimes nurturing, other times destroying. Casey’s book is an engaging reminder of that.

Science writer Mary Roach is making a nice career out of comic explanations of subjects that might otherwise make her audience uneasy.  Her two previous books were Stiff : the curious lives of human cadavers and Spook : science tackles the afterlife.

Her research takes her back to the Napoleonic era, through modern surgery, CAT and PET scans, involving thousands of faceless volunteers, pigs, monkeys, porcupines and more.  We learn about monkey gland transplants,  Masters and Johnson, and the rickety framework on which pheromone research is built.  Roach finds herself wired to instruments measuring her responses, and even recruits what must be the most understanding husband on earth for a session in an MRI.

Like Stephen King, Roach is not above going for the occasional gross-out, but she’s mostly interested in educating us, and entertaining us in the process.