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The Body: A Guide for Occupants

Bill Bryson

4.33 · Rating details · 7,886 ratings · 1,184 reviews

In the bestselling, prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making the science of our world both understandable and entertaining to millions of people around the globe.

Now he turns his attention inwards to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary ...more

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Hardcover, 450 pages

Published October 15th 2019 by Doubleday Books

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Jan 10, 2020 Emily (Books with Emily Fox) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: audiobooks, 2019-releases

This was actually really good!

Highly recommend it if the topic interested you, the audiobook was also great!

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Oct 06, 2019 Theresa Alan rated it it was amazing

I learned so much from this book. One of the things I learned was that continuing to learn and keeping my brain active will help me avoid dementia, so you should read this book, too. I flagged many, many pages, so I’ll just offer a few highlights here.

The most interesting thing was reading about our skin, the tiny tiny layer that we makes us white or black or brown. Bryson watched a surgeon incise and peel back a sliver of skin a millimeter thick from the arm of cadaver. It was so thin it was I learned so much from this book. One of the things I learned was that continuing to learn and keeping my brain active will help me avoid dementia, so you should read this book, too. I flagged many, many pages, so I’ll just offer a few highlights here.

The most interesting thing was reading about our skin, the tiny tiny layer that we makes us white or black or brown. Bryson watched a surgeon incise and peel back a sliver of skin a millimeter thick from the arm of cadaver. It was so thin it was translucent. That’s what race is. Which is why it’s so ridiculous that such a small facet of our composition should be given so much importance when it’s merely a reaction to sunlight. “Biologically, there is no such thing as race—nothing in terms of skin color, facial features, hair type, bone structure, or anything else that is a defining quality among peoples.”

Skins gets its color from a variety of pigments, the best known is a molecule we know as melanin. It’s also responsible for the color of birds’ feathers and gives fish the texture and luminescence of the their scales. Our skin evolved based on our geography.

A lot of myths I grew up with are not true. Like the fact we only use ten percent of our brain--false. I was taught as a kid that different parts of the tongue were attuned to different tastes like salty, sweet, sour. Nope. Also, like the movie the Matrix, apparently when I eat a brownie straight from the oven, it doesn’t actually taste good, my brain just reads these scentless, flavorless molecules and makes me think they’re pleasurable.

In one of the studies he talks about, a man was given an injection of a harmless liquid to mimic snot. It couldn’t be seen by the naked eye, but under those blue lights detectives use. The test subject went into a room with other folks, and when they turned the overhead lights off and the blue lights on, every single person, doorknob, and bowl of nuts had the pretend snot on it, which is how the common cold passes from person to person so easily—through touch, apparently not by making out with someone (although presumably at some point you might touch that person).

Antibiotics
• Almost 3/4ths of prescriptions written each year are for conditions that can’t be cured with antibiotics (like bronchitis)
• 80 percent of antibiotics are fed to farm animals to fatten them up which meat eaters then consume, which is one of the reasons antibiotics aren’t as effective as they used to be.
• Fruit growers use antibiotics to combat bacterial infections in their crops, sometimes even of produce mar ked “organic.” Which means we humans are unwittingly eating antibiotics, rendering them ineffective when we need them for a real disease/infection.

There’s a lot more interesting stuff in here. Thanks so much to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book, which RELEASES OCTOBER 15, 2019.
...more

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Nov 11, 2019 Matthew rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Those with no fear of their own mortality

Shelves: non-fiction, library, audio, 2019, gr_awards_2020

The definition of a “well” person?
Someone who hasn’t been examined yet
(loosely quoted from the book)

This book is two things:
- Really interesting trivia about the human body
- Terrifying

I love trivia, and this book had tons of it. This was not a deeply scientific analysis of the human body. It is just snippets and brief anecdotes from various regions of the body as Bryson takes you on a journey through our innerspace. If you are not into big fancy words and meandering analysis, then you need not ...more

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Dec 13, 2019 Science (Fiction) Nerd Mario rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 0-biology, bryson-bill

To know that one does not know how not just even a tiny part of the body works is the first step to getting interested in exploring each fascinating, inner landscape.

From up to down, inside to outside, young to old, organ to nerve and so on goes the journey trough our miraculous wonder of nature whose amazing eyes are just sending this information to the brain of the reader.

Many myths about the body are shown and design flaws described, but after billion years of evolution, thats no wonder. We ...more

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Nov 06, 2019 Jenna rated it it was amazing

Shelves: medical, non-fiction, science

How to make a human body:

Blend together the right amount of each of 59 elements, at a cost of US$151,578.46 according to the Royal Society of Chemistry.

~Or~

If you don't have that kind of money lying about, you can also do it the old-fashioned way that involves heterosexual sex. I'm not here to judge your methods; make a human whichever way you please. What I am here to do is tell you that Bill Bryson has done it again! He has written yet another brilliant and vastly interesting book, this time ...more

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Jul 17, 2019 Betsy rated it really liked it

Shelves: netgalley

Be a bar trivia champion!
Want to dominate any biology questions at bar trivia?

The Body: A Guide for Occupants has you covered! For those of us who haven't had a biology class since we fulfilled some course requirement ages ago, Bryson gives an excellent overview of what doctors and scientists know about all our different body parts and bodily functions.

This book does for biology what books like Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong or A People's History ...more

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Oct 30, 2019 Trevor rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science, history, medicine

I like Bryson, his books are often amusing and informative. He has a good eye for details that will keep the reader engaged or outraged or just smile. This is a tour of the human body, but it includes stories and asides about people associated with the discovery of various diseases or a cure or a system in the body. Some books on this topic can get a bit carried away with long names for parts that involve endless Latin or Greek. A nice thing he does here when he does give these is to say what I like Bryson, his books are often amusing and informative. He has a good eye for details that will keep the reader engaged or outraged or just smile. This is a tour of the human body, but it includes stories and asides about people associated with the discovery of various diseases or a cure or a system in the body. Some books on this topic can get a bit carried away with long names for parts that involve endless Latin or Greek. A nice thing he does here when he does give these is to say what the words mean in English, often interesting enough in itself, and to say why the person naming it that might have thought that was a good idea.

I didn't realise that the X-chromosome was called that because the person who discovered it didn’t know what it did – and so, like ‘planet X’, the letter was chosen due to this mystery rather than for the chromosome’s shape. And the Y-chromosome was likewise named following on from X in the alphabet.

You come away from this thinking that a lot of people are basically bastards. I won’t spoil the stories, but the person who took credit for Streptomycin fits this category particularly nicely.

This is a quick read and an interesting one. Particularly good is the last chapter – you know, we are all going to die sooner or later and so death often sharpens our interest. I’ve become fascinated by the idea that no one is allowed to die of ‘old age’ any more. You have to have died of something, but as Bryson says, getting old generally involves multiple things going wrong with you – and so picking one generally ignores the significant contribution one or other of the things you were suffering from inevitably played in your demise. Perhaps saying ‘he died of old age’ as the cause of death would be in fact be more accurate. Some of the things people were allowed to die of in the past seem so much better than heart disease or cancer - like ennui, for example. "I think he died mostly of listlessness..." As I said recently to a friend of Facebook – the category of deaths I would choose for myself would be ‘peacefully and in his sleep’.
...more

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Aug 25, 2019 Brandon Forsyth rated it it was amazing

I either laughed, shook my head in wonder, or did both on every page. This is Bryson at his best, and it should be handed out at birth.

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Nov 23, 2019 Trish rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Until now, I only knew Bill Bryson for his snarky travelogues. My buddy-reader, however, informed me that his non-fiction book was very good indeed. Besides, many biology books suffer from the fact that their authors are great scientists but horrible writers. So I wanted to read something that had the potential to be entertaining as well as educational.

The book is divided into these chapters:

And yes, we did get a little bit of humour, but that wasn't because Bryson made fun of certain things, Until now, I only knew Bill Bryson for his snarky travelogues. My buddy-reader, however, informed me that his non-fiction book was very good indeed. Besides, many biology books suffer from the fact that their authors are great scientists but horrible writers. So I wanted to read something that had the potential to be entertaining as well as educational.

The book is divided into these chapters:

And yes, we did get a little bit of humour, but that wasn't because Bryson made fun of certain things, but was very good at pointing out the hilarity of history and us silly homo sapiens.

Bryson decided to explain anatomy to the reader as well as giving historical and practical context.
We thus hear of the abominable Typhoid Mary, a women who, at one point, found out she was one of the rare carriers of typhoid without showing any symptoms, but decided to still work in kitchens (against a promise she had made to the authorities) and didn't even bother to wash her hands before preparing meals, thus spreading the disease until she was finally put under house arrest.
Or Nicholas Alkemade, who served in WW2 and jumped out of his plane (his parachute had burnt to cinders and he preferred not to burn to death), survived falling 5500 metres into a pile of snow (after having been slowed down by some pine trees) and suffering only a sprained leg. After the war had ended, he worked in a chemical plant where, while removing chlorine gas-generating liquid from a sump, he received a severe electric shock from the equipment he was using. His gas mask became dislodged and he began breathing in the poisonous gas. After 15 minutes, his appeals for aid were finally answered and he was dragged to safety, nearly asphyxiated by the fumes. Not long after, a siphoning pipe burst, spraying Alkemade’s face and arms with industrial sulphuric acid. With astounding presence of mind, he dived head-first into a nearby drum of limewash, thereby neutralising the acid and escaping with only 1st-degree-burns. He returned to work, but was pinned beneath an almost 3m long steel door runner that fell from its mountings as he passed by, escaping - somehow - with only minor bruising. However, after this, even he came to his senses and decided to no longer tempt fate. He thus became a furniture salesman, dying peacefully in June 1987.

Just two examples of how remarkable and resilient the human body can be (though Mary, in my opinion, was mostly an example of being sick of mind). There are others, of course, such as people being trapped in frozen lakes or extremely cold weather, who are afterwards successfully (slowly) warmed up and who survived (babies even).

The book is full of other fascinating facts as well. Many of us know, for example, that damages to our frontal lobes result in personality changes, which was the reason lobotomy became popular at one point in human history (Rosemary Kennedy was lobotomized because her father considered her too willful, something Bryson mentions in this book, too).
Did you also know that it's 400 times more likely that a teenager is in an accident if said teenager is accompanied by another teenager?! And this isn't just limited to car accidents.
Or did you know that we always say "our 5 senses" but that there are many more? Like the sense that tells us if we're lying down or standing upright even when our eyes are closed? It's called proprioception (our sense of where we are in relation to the space around us).
Or did you know how many things we still cannot explain? One such thing are emotional responses like crying when sad - it has no physiological benefit AND is the same response as for joy so why are we doing it?

Science, it's history, trials and errors but also impressive feats from hundreds of years ago, groundbreaking discoveries (the most well-known example being penicillin), modern appliances and procedures but also problems that will become more dangerous in the near future ... I was delighted how Bryson presented it all comprehensibly and explained it in a way every layman can understand, often giving examples from every-day occurrences, always showing just how much he is fascinated by the subject(s) himself.

A wonderful look at an important and thrilling subject (us) by a seriously talented author - just don't be prissy about digestion or our insides. ;P ...more

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Nov 25, 2019 Bradley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2019-shelf, non-fiction

For all of you other cyborgs and pure artificial intelligences out there, I should mention that this is a rather interesting primer on regular meat-sacks. It even has the distinction of not being science fiction at all.

But as the title suggests, outright occupancy usually comes with a rental charge. The bill always comes due.

I've read a few Brysons before... and my favorite has got to be A Short History of Nearly Everything. This one, from a regular knowledge-gathering stand, comes in as a tight ...more

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Oct 12, 2019 Karen Rush rated it it was amazing

Bill Bryson’s trademark humor is evident in this fascinating book that provides detailed descriptions of the body, how things function and history of discovery. A big takeaway is that although there have been great strides in what we know about science and medicine, he makes it clear just how much is still unknown about how and why things work.

This book would be perfect to serve as a primer for a high school health and wellness course. Thanks to Doubleday Books for the ARC in exchange for my ...more

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Dec 22, 2019 Paul rated it liked it

Shelves: medicine

3.5 stars
I am joining a book club; unusual for me because I am not a hugely social animal. It is based at the university where I work for one day a week and it meets a lunch time, once every two months. This is the book for January; it’s not something I would have read in normal circumstances.
Bryson employs his usual wry and laconic style and applies it to the human body. This isn’t a medical text book, but it is detailed and covers pretty much what you would expect. Bryson does cover the ...more

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Jan 07, 2020 Roy Lotz rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history-of-science, medicine, highly-recommended-favorites

This book was given to me as a Christmas present, and it was a great gift. As a fan of Bryson, I was surprised that I had not even heard of his new work of popular science. I am glad that it came to my attention, then, since this was my favorite Bryson book since A Short History of Nearly Everything. Structured as a tour of the human body, the book made me feel right at home.

No matter what the subject, Bryson’s style is consistent: snappy prose, engaging anecdotes, and fun facts, all tied This book was given to me as a Christmas present, and it was a great gift. As a fan of Bryson, I was surprised that I had not even heard of his new work of popular science. I am glad that it came to my attention, then, since this was my favorite Bryson book since A Short History of Nearly Everything. Structured as a tour of the human body, the book made me feel right at home.

No matter what the subject, Bryson’s style is consistent: snappy prose, engaging anecdotes, and fun facts, all tied together with a lot of curiosity and humor. At its worst, this can make for some superficial books—a meandering array of factoids with little structure—which in my experience plagues his history writing. But science seems to bring out the best in Bryson. Here, the writing is disciplined and controlled. He clearly did a great deal of research and organized his facts with care. And Bryson has a rare talent for research. You would think that, in our media-saturated age, most of the great stories and characters from history would be known. But somehow Bryson is always able to uncover an unsung hero with an eccentric personality. The history of science seems particularly rich in this.

Bryson not only unearths unsung heroes, but surprising information. Bryson is a fun fact factory. Arguably, fun facts are the very definition of superficial knowledge; but Bryson’s curiosities are irresistible. There were so many things about the body—about digestion, sleep cycles, anatomy, disease—that I did not know, and so many things that surprised me. For example, I learned that our eyes do not only have rods and cones, but photoreceptive ganglion cells; these do not contribute to vision in any way, but tell us when it is light or dark. This is why some blind people instinctually know if it is day or night, or even if the light is on or off.

Bryson’s style is also well-suited to popular science. His jokes, comments, and asides can be distracting in other contexts; but when reporting potentially dry scientific information, the humor helps. And it must be said that Bryson’s two biggest preoccupations—things we do not know, and things that can kill us (or ideally both)—have ample material in a book about the human body. Indeed, this book gave me a bit of death anxiety, since Bryson dwells on all of the things that can go seriously wrong and how little we know about the why. The scariest thing, for me, was the section on antibiotics. The rate at which bacteria adapt to antibiotics is far outpacing the rate at which we are discovering new medicines. (And our flagrant overuse of antibiotics is certainly not helping.) If we do not somehow reverse this trend, we can have a real crisis in the near future.

If the book has any takeaway, it is that lifestyle is important. Exercises is tremendously beneficial; and inactivity is likewise lethal. A good diet makes a big difference, too, as does avoiding obviously harmful activities like smoking and excessive drinking. Our bad habits in the United States are partially why we lag behind other developed nations in life expectancy. As Bryson also points out, our health system is not particularly good, either, despite the enormous costs involved (several times the prices in other countries). Indeed, the American health system is not only lagging behind other countries, but is actively creating problems. The most obvious example of this is the opioid epidemic, which is largely caused by overprescribing pain medication. And the reason that these medications are only overprescribed in America, it seems, is the unsavory relationship between doctors and drug companies.

As you can see, there is a great deal of interest in these pages—from the history of science, to the development of modern medicine, to the science of anatomy and physiology—none of it dense, dull, or otherwise difficult, but rather witty, charming, and altogether fun to read. I recommend it. ...more

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Dec 08, 2019 carol. marked it as don-t-count

Shelves: not-for-me

Well, if the dude can't get the difference between a feeding tube and a breathing tube coming out of someone's nose, I'm not sure how accurate his guide is going to be. Add in problems explaining kidney failure, gram staining and smallpox vaccines, and I think this is a solid 'miss.'

Most telling phrase from the review: "Recommended 'Not for the science, which can be found in a more detailed and accurate form elsewhere, but for the view, a sweep of landscape with endless little tragicomedies ...more

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Oct 24, 2019 Sonja Arlow rated it really liked it

Shelves: audio-books, 2019-read, non-fiction, medicine, recommended

3.5 stars

This is like A Short History of Nearly Everything but for the body.

Had I not read so many medical books and watched endless hours of QI I would have given this a MUCH higher rating but because of this prior knowledge some sections felt like deja vu.

The scope of the book is impressive, Bill does not leave any stone (or rather muscle, cell, bacteria or organ) unexplored.

I also learned enough fascinating trivia which I plan to spring on unsuspecting friends at inappropriate times for my ...more

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Jul 21, 2019 Snooty1 rated it it was amazing

Even for someone with a science/ medical background this was PHENOMENAL!
What an absolutely interesting and eye opening adventure into our bodies; and told in such a entertaining way!!!
Recommend for ANYONE and EVERYONE

Thanks to netgalley and Doubleday books for providing me with a copy of this book for my honest review.

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Nov 09, 2019 Olive rated it liked it

Shelves: medical

See my review on booktube: https://youtu.be/vX_ZVCxF-XA

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Nov 30, 2019 Rebecca rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: medical, science-tech, 2019-second-half-most-antic, requested-from-publisher, read-via-edelweiss, wellcome-prize-2020-hopeful, history, reviewed-for-blog, best-of-2019

Shelve this next to Being Mortal by Atul Gawande in a collection of books that everyone should read – even if you’re a squeamish hypochondriac or you don’t normally choose nonfiction. Bryson is back on form with his latest, indulging his layman’s curiosity about how the body works. Now, I read a LOT of medical memoirs and popular science. I’ve read entire books about organ transplantation, sleep, dementia, the blood, the heart, evolutionary defects, surgery and so on, but in many cases these go Shelve this next to Being Mortal by Atul Gawande in a collection of books that everyone should read – even if you’re a squeamish hypochondriac or you don’t normally choose nonfiction. Bryson is back on form with his latest, indulging his layman’s curiosity about how the body works. Now, I read a LOT of medical memoirs and popular science. I’ve read entire books about organ transplantation, sleep, dementia, the blood, the heart, evolutionary defects, surgery and so on, but in many cases these go into more detail than I really need and I can find my interest waning. That never happens here. Without ever being superficial or patronizing his readers, the author gives a comprehensive introduction to every organ and body system, moving briskly between engaging anecdotes from medical history and encapsulated research on everything from gut microbes to cancer treatment.

Bryson delights in our physical oddities, and his sense of wonder is infectious. How fantastic that there is such a thing as the Belly Button Biodiversity Project (run by North Carolina State University) that has discovered 1,458 species in bacteria new to science in people’s navels! How astounding that a man hiccupped for 67 years straight! As you’ve likely gathered from his other work, he loves a good statistic, and while this book is full of numbers and percentages, they are accessible rather than obfuscating, and will make you shake your head in amazement.

“A study in Switzerland found that flu virus can survive on a banknote for two and a half weeks if it is accompanied by a microdot of snot.”

“If you’ve ever wondered why no one wants to kiss you first thing in the morning, it is possibly because your exhalations may contain up to 150 different chemical compounds” including “methyl mercaptan (which smells like very old cabbage), hydrogen sulphide (like rotten eggs), dimethyl sulphide (slimy seaweed)”, etc.

“Even with the advantage of clothing, shelter and boundless ingenuity, humans can manage to live on only about 12 per cent of Earth’s land area”

“Altogether there are about seven thousand rare diseases – so many that about one person in seventeen in the developed world has one, which isn’t very rare at all. But, sadly, so long as a disease affects only a small number of people it is unlikely to get much research attention. For 90 per cent of rare diseases there are no effective treatments at all.”

This is a congenial and persistently cheerful book, even when discussing illness, scientists whose work was overlooked, and the inevitability of death. What I found most sobering was the observation that, having conquered many diseases and extended our life expectancy, we are now overwhelmingly killed by our lifestyle, mostly a poor diet of processed and sugary foods and a lack of exercise – “we are born with the bodies of hunter–gatherers but pass our lives as couch potatoes.”

A few specific things I learned:

I’ve had a nasty cold for the past two weeks, and this book saved me from making a wasted purchase – I had just put Vitamin C on the shopping list when I read that taking large doses of Vitamin C is ineffectual. That it can cure a cold is an urban myth. Immediately, I crossed it off the list and ate an orange instead.

It takes 72 hours for food to move through a woman’s digestive system and be excreted. I’d always assumed that what I was getting rid of was my last meal – so that if I had a bout of diarrhea I could blame it on what I’d just eaten. I’m now curious to know how it works for flatulence: I’m sure that I get instant flatulence after eating chickpeas, lentils, eggs or cheese. But is that just my imagination? Maybe I’m actually observing the effects of a meal from a few days ago.

A neat thing to know about cold weather; it makes total sense, but had never occurred to me. “Incidentally, the reason your nose runs in chilly weather is the same reason your bathroom windows run with water in chilly weather. In the case of your nose, warm air from your lungs meets cold air coming into the nostrils and condenses, resulting in a drip.”

Favorite passages:

“Your body is a universe of mystery. A very large part of what happens on and within it happens for reasons that we don’t know – very often, no doubt, because there are no reasons. Evolution is an accidental process, after all.”

“Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding.” ...more

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Sep 11, 2019 Nursebookie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: doubledaybooks, favorites, medical, nonfiction, netgalley

"THE BODY" by Bill Bryson.

Did you ever think you ever needed an owner's manual for our complex body? I think this was a brilliant idea!! We live in this body that we are so intimate with and yet could hardly speak of what goes on inside or tell us the functions of the organs we have, nor even name them, Bryson took a Biology Book, that is the last thing I ever want, and turned it to an amazing book that I cannot keep my hands away from.

Converting a daunting and boring science book into an ...more

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Oct 10, 2019 Toni rated it it was amazing

Shelves: arcs-2019

A casual readable guide for the ‘common man,’ (you know I mean person). Reading through this book by Bill Bryson, is like talking to your favorite uncle at the Thanksgiving table, after everyone else went to watch the football game. You and he are nibbling dessert, sipping coffee and just chatting about the human body. That’s how easy the writing flows.
So far from any textbook, it contains valuable facts yet it’s not overly technical. The categories or elements of the vast network that contains ...more

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Oct 16, 2019 Bam cooks the books ;-) rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, 2019-netgalley, 2019-reads

"I didn't know that!"--the phrase most often used by me as I read this book.

Bill Bryson explores what makes up the human body from head to toe, from birth to death, with his trademark wit and wisdom. He delves into how a healthy body functions and what can go wrong, how medicines and treatments have evolved over the years, discussing which scientists and doctors made important discoveries that benefitted humanity and which crackpot theories were eventually debunked. Best advice for living a ...more

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Nov 17, 2019 Julie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction

A truly amazing compendium on the human body aka "a warm wobble of flesh!" Truly engaging and enlightening. Occasionally I wanted to fast forward to avoid the details, but mainly I was truly engaged, appalled or enthralled!

My personal favorite of Bill Bryson's anecdotal stories:
The emergency appendectomy on a US submarine during WWII. The ship's pharmacist assistant was ordered to operate without any knowledge or equipment, as he as was the senior medical personnel on board. This is a little ...more

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Jan 04, 2020 Ingrid rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Very interesting and informative. Easy to read.

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Oct 07, 2019 Brian Clegg rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I am a huge fan of Bill Bryson's travel books - he is a superb storyteller, and in the best parts of his science writing, this ability to provide fascinating facts and intriguing tales shines through.

After taking on the whole of science in his first book, here he focuses in on the physiology, anatomy and diseases of the human body. Bryson does so with his usual light, approachable style, peppering the plethora of facts (and 'don't know's - it's amazing how much we still don't know about the I am a huge fan of Bill Bryson's travel books - he is a superb storyteller, and in the best parts of his science writing, this ability to provide fascinating facts and intriguing tales shines through.

After taking on the whole of science in his first book, here he focuses in on the physiology, anatomy and diseases of the human body. Bryson does so with his usual light, approachable style, peppering the plethora of facts (and 'don't know's - it's amazing how much we still don't know about the workings of the body) with the little nuggets you can't help but share and stories of some of the odd and, frankly, horrifying goings on in the history of medicine.

So, for example, Bryson throws in 'The chin is unique to humans and no one knows why we have one.' He speculates that it might be just that we 'find a good chin dashing' and quotes a Harvard professor as saying 'Testing this last hypothesis is especially difficult, but the reader is encouraged to think of appropriate experiments.'

It's a long time since I read Bryson's first science book, but I suspect that his Short History of Nearly Everything involved more going and talking to scientists, so had more of the feel of a documentary, and more opportunity to bring in his travel writing skills. Here, there was more of a focus on presentation of facts, though always in a way that felt more like a conversation with a friend than an introductory textbook on human biology - and there are still a number of interviews.

A good example of the way Bryson goes about exploring a topic is the way he deals with asthma. He starts with a story about the writer Marcel Proust, describing the many ways that Proust attempted to treat the condition, including enemas, opium and having the gas to his house cut off. From Proust we move on to the way asthma has become more prevalent and the remarkable variation around the world - not, as you might expect, paralleling the degree of air pollution. It was shocking to read that the highest rate in the world is in the UK, where '30 per cent of children have shown asthma symptoms in the last year.' This is compared with rates around 3 percent in China, Greece, Romania and Russia. He then goes on, using an interview with an expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to show how most of our ideas about asthma are wrong. For example, he quotes Neil Pearce as saying 'the main thing I have achieved is to show that almost none of the things people think cause asthma actually do.'

Along the way Bryson takes us on a tour of the body, starting with 'the outside' (skin and hair) and working through all the main parts, the vast numbers of microbes that share our body, body functions - such as movement, eating and sleep - and diseases, finishing with a whole chapter on cancer and another on the way that medicine has developed from doing more harm than good to its present state.

This is the perfect book for anyone (like me) who had little to do with biology at school and to whom much of the functioning of human anatomy is a mystery. You know that with Bryson at the helm, the voyage through your inner workings is bound to be fascinating and entertaining. I wish there had been more opportunity for his humour and recounting personal adventures, as in his travel books, because this is where Bryson is at his best - but even when recounting facts he keeps the reader interested, never lingering long enough to get bogged down.

Well worth a look. ...more

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Oct 28, 2019 Gretchen Rubin added it

A delightful, fascinating book all about the body.

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Oct 21, 2019 Indieflower rated it it was amazing

Bill Bryson is so good at this stuff, imparting incredibly interesting information in a light, conversational tone that's easy to digest. Fascinating, informative, somewhat alarming and horrifying at times - such as the case of Fanny Burney, who in 1810 at the age of 58, underwent a radical mastectomy without anaesthesia, she not only lived long enough afterwards to write a detailed, stomach churning account of her ordeal but went on to survive another 29 years. I found it somewhat unsettling to ...more

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Oct 28, 2019 Emma rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science, non-fiction

The fact that I was a) able to read a science book and b) find it interesting, is a testimony to Bill Bryson and his ability to make just about anything entertaining and understandable.

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Dec 06, 2019 Laura Noggle rated it it was amazing

Shelves: would-will-read-again, nonfiction, 2019

Engrossing book, LOVED it! One of my favorites of December 2019.

Very reminiscent of one of my all time favorite books in general, Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. This has that classic Bryson charm with lots of interesting factoids.

Definitely a deep dive, kind of like hopping on the Magic School Bus with Miss Frizzle.

Would revisit this one in the future.

“Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble ...more

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Dec 26, 2019 Josh rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2019

This was my first foray into Bryson territory and it was an interesting experience.

I finished this the day prior to Christmas just an hour or two before a nice meal. Did I feel a little guilty about what I was putting in my body directly after I read The Body? Not really, to be honest.

I learned a few things here and there that I didn't know (hormones are even made in our bones!), but overall it was a reading experience that was helped along by his writing and humor.

There are multiple times, ...more

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Oct 16, 2019 Ryan Boissonneault rated it really liked it

If you’d like to learn more about how the body works but don’t want to read textbooks on human anatomy and physiology, this is the book for you. As Bryson writes, “We pass our existence within this warm wobble of flesh and yet take it entirely for granted.” We are the product of three billion years of evolutionary refinement, a biological machine of unimagined complexity, and yet most of us can’t even identify where the spleen is, or what it does.

If this book doesn’t pique your interest in how If you’d like to learn more about how the body works but don’t want to read textbooks on human anatomy and physiology, this is the book for you. As Bryson writes, “We pass our existence within this warm wobble of flesh and yet take it entirely for granted.” We are the product of three billion years of evolutionary refinement, a biological machine of unimagined complexity, and yet most of us can’t even identify where the spleen is, or what it does.

If this book doesn’t pique your interest in how your body works, then nothing probably will. Bryson takes the reader through each body system, describing the anatomy and physiology of each, but also providing historical information, expert interviews, and biographical details on the pioneers of medical discovery. Bryson, as usual, writes in an informative and entertaining way, presenting information in clever ways (for example, when he states that a portion of your cerebral cortex the size of a grain of sand can hold 1.2 billion copies of this book.) The book is filled with calculations and analogies like this to help the reader better contextualize the information.

I also appreciate how Bryson doesn’t mindlessly repeat the cliches we always here without doing his research. It’s commonly stated that we only use 10 percent of our brains, or that our body contains 10 times as many bacterial cells as human cells. It turns out that these statements, among many others, are false, and Bryson shows you why. He doesn’t take anything for granted and researches all such claims.

You will also come to understand—not only how much you don’t understand about the body—but also how much of the body no one understands. The body is unfathomably complex, and many areas and functions remain mysterious.

If I had to say anything negative about the book, it would be the lack of illustrations. Some diagrams would be helpful, especially on the sections covering anatomy, as it’s hard to visualize the structures as he’s describing them. Also, don’t expect to dive too deeply into the functioning of each body system—the details are selective and you’re going to get equal measures of the history behind the discoveries. This is not a bad thing, as long as you’re expecting it.

Overall, this is probably the best popular book on the subject, and a good entry point for further study in anatomy, physiology, human evolution, or medicine. ...more

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About Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson

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William McGuire "Bill" Bryson, OBE, FRS was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. He settled in England in 1977, and worked in journalism until he became a full time writer. He lived for many years with his English wife and four children in North Yorkshire. He and his family then moved to New Hampshire in America for a few years, but they have now returned to live in the UK.

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“The most remarkable part of all is your DNA. You have a metre of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single fine strand it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.8 Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic.” — 7 likes

“Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size—about the size of a grain of sand—could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book.” — 6 likes

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