Gross America

Description

Part "Weird U.S." and part "Roadside America," GROSS AMERICA offers families a road trip through the USA that would delight the King of Bad Taste John Waters and the unflappable guys on MTV’s "Jackass."

Sure, you could use your vacation days to take the family to the beach again. Or, you could plan a trip to see brains in jars, frozen dead guys, and visit a factory that makes candy-coated insects.  You can:

• head down to Houston, Texas, and walk inside a 27-foot model of the human intestinal system
• visit a Civil War battlefield embalming diorama
• head over to explorers Lewis & Clark’s latrines
• look at the world’s largest fungus
• visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City
• touch the oldest human turd
• recoil from a massive human hairball that grew for seven years before it was surgically removed from the stomach of a 12-year-old girl who suffered from compulsive hair nibbling
• see the corroded mandible of a Tyrannosaurus Rex at the nation’s largest natural history museum in Chicago
• visit the first funeral home to offer flameless cremation services
• make a pilgrimage to Chicago to visit America’s last remaining plastic vomit factory
• journey to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see a dog poop–fueled streetlamp
• travel to Nederland, Colorado, for “Frozen Dead Guy Days,” an annual celebration of at-home cryogenics experiments
• spend some time among the preserved human brains at Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum
• take in the acclaimed cockroach dioramas of Plano, Texas

Gross America is a coast-to-coast catalog of the most grandly gross science experiments, beautifully bizarre art, and delightfully disgusting historical sites that America has to offer. Part travel atlas, part trivia guide, Gross America presents these United States as you’ve never seen them before—weird, wonderful, strange, and totally, utterly gross.

RICHARD FAULK is a freelance writer and editor. Formerly an associate editor at Scholastic, Inc., and onetime time-travel columnist, he has also written about Vikings for Australian tweens, reported on academic conferences for Columbia University, and celebrated the films of Pam Grier in Penthouse. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he thinks deeply about trivial matters.US

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