Bookshop Santa Cruz presents: Mary Roach | REPLACEABLE YOU

When purchasing your tickets, go slow and steady! If you refresh or try and go back during payment, you may get an error message and/or place multiple orders. Not sure if your order went through? PLEASE check your email for confirmation and ticket emails before trying again!

ABOUT THE EVENT + TICKETS: 

• This in-person event will include a 1-hour book talk with audience Q&A, followed by a book signing. 

• Ticket packages are $37 and include entry for 1 person, plus 1 complimentary hardcover edition of REPLACEABLE YOU!

  • Each ticket package contains separate barcodes for your entry and your book.

  • Your book will be available for pickup as you enter the show, or early at Bookshop Santa Cruz beginning on 9/16, its release date (hence the second barcode)

  • If you do not want your complimentary book, we're happy to donate it!

  • Books uncollected at the event will be held for pickup at Bookshop Santa Cruz for two months, after which they will be released.  

• Doors open 30 minutes before showtime. Open seating.

• Tickets include ALL taxes and fees. Tickets are final sale and do not qualify for Readers Club credit.

This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.

Thanks for your interest! We can't wait to see you at the event!

ABOUT THE BOOK: 

The body is the most complex machine in the world, and the only one for which you cannot get a replacement part from the manufacturer. For centuries, medicine has reached for what's available—sculpting noses from brass, borrowing skin from frogs and hearts from pigs, crafting eye parts from jet canopies and breasts from petroleum by-products. Today we're attempting to grow body parts from scratch using stem cells and 3D printers. How are we doing? Are we there yet?

In Replaceable You, Mary Roach explores the remarkable advances and difficult questions prompted by the human body's failings. When and how does a person decide they'd be better off with a prosthetic than their existing limb? Can a donated heart be made to beat forever? Can an intestine provide a workable substitute for a vagina?

Roach dives in with her characteristic verve and infectious wit. Her travels take her to the OR at a legendary burn unit in Boston, a "superclean" xeno-pigsty in China, and a stem cell "hair nursery" in the San Diego tech hub. She talks with researchers and surgeons, amputees and ostomates, printers of kidneys and designers of wearable organs. She spends time in a working iron lung from the 1950s, stays up all night with recovery techs as they disassemble and reassemble a tissue donor, and travels across Mongolia with the cataract surgeons of Orbis International. 

Irrepressible and accessible, Replaceable You immerses readers in the wondrous, improbable, and surreal quest to build a new you.