Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Mysterious and miraculous, the human body is more than a masterfully engineered biological machine. And Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling, 2016) serves as a delightful tour guide to nearly every component, protuberance, and crevice of it: skin, brain, sensory apparatus, heart, blood, bones, lungs, guts, immune system, genitourinary organs. Sleep, memory, hormones, pain, and aging are also explored. Peculiar bodily functions—hiccups, yawning, crying—are examined. We produce three types of tears (lubricating, reflex, and emotional). We blink about 14,000 times a day. The plethora of facts presented runs the gamut from mind-boggling to bizarre. A teaspoon of human blood contains around 25-billion erythrocytes. A typical American will eat about 60 tons (yes, tons!) of food during a lifetime. At the other end, an adult will eliminate roughly 180 pounds of poop annually. The runty Y chromosome has been shrinking for millions of years. Fifty-nine elements are necessary to build a body. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorous make up about 99-percent of it, but would you have guessed a bit of tin and zirconium are necessary, too? Bryson's splendid stroll through human anatomy, physiology, evolution, and illness (diabetes, cancer, infections) is instructive, accessible, and entertaining. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
The Body
Bill Bryson can take any topic and spool it into the most entertaining thing you've ever read. He tackles diverse subjects, from hiking the Appalachian Trail (A Walk in the Woods) to, well—everything (A Short History of Nearly Everything).
In his latest book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bryson divides the body's various parts and processes into 23 chapters, with subject headings such as "The Heart and Blood," "The Guts" and "Nerves and Pain." Each relatively short chapter is chock-full of clear, in-depth explanations of the body and its components, focusing just the right amount of facts and attention on each area to keep the reader riveted and eager to dive into the next topic.
As with his previous writings, Bryson demonstrates his gift for putting science in layman's terms, deftly melding the most incredible statistics with wit to expose humorous and fascinating aspects of the human condition. He relates these nuggets of information to everyday life, such as when he compares a cell to a little room that is "of itself as nonliving as any other room." Yet when combined with the busy, also nonliving things housed within its walls—such as proteins, DNA and mitochondria—life is created.
Throughout the book, Bryson highlights parts of the human physique that are mysteries even to doctors and scientists. He creatively intertwines amazing medical advances, such as transplant surgery and antibiotics, with topics that are still very much unknown, such as the immune system and allergies. It's rather humbling to realize that there's so much we don't know about the place that houses all of our thoughts, feelings and physical attributes. As Bryson so effectively conveys in The Body, we truly are a work in progress.
Copyright 2019 BookPage Reviews.BookPage Reviews
The Body
Bill Bryson can take any topic and spool it into the most entertaining thing you've ever read. He tackles diverse subjects, from hiking the Appalachian Trail (A Walk in the Woods) to, well—everything (A Short History of Nearly Everything).
In his latest book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bryson divides the body's various parts and processes into 23 chapters, with subject headings such as "The Heart and Blood," "The Guts" and "Nerves and Pain." Each relatively short chapter is chock-full of clear, in-depth explanations of the body and its components, focusing just the right amount of facts and attention on each area to keep the reader riveted and eager to dive into the next topic.
As with his previous writings, Bryson demonstrates his gift for putting science in layman's terms, deftly melding the most incredible statistics with wit to expose humorous and fascinating aspects of the human condition. He relates these nuggets of information to everyday life, such as when he compares a cell to a little room that is "of itself as nonliving as any other room." Yet when combined with the busy, also nonliving things housed within its walls—such as proteins, DNA and mitochondria—life is created.
Throughout the book, Bryson highlights parts of the human physique that are mysteries even to doctors and scientists. He creatively intertwines amazing medical advances, such as transplant surgery and antibiotics, with topics that are still very much unknown, such as the immune system and allergies. It's rather humbling to realize that there's so much we don't know about the place that houses all of our thoughts, feelings and physical attributes. As Bryson so effectively conveys in The Body, we truly are a work in progress.
Copyright 2020 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
The intrepid explorer and popular travel writer journeys inward—literally—to explore our mortal coil. A narrative by Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain, 2016, etc.) rarely involves the unfolding of a grand thesis; instead, it's a congeries of anecdotes, skillfully strung, always a pleasure to read but seldom earthshakingly significant. So it is here. The author does some on-the-ground digging, talking to scientists and physicians, while plowing through libraries of literature to get at the story of how our bodies work. Early on, he pokes at the old bromide that the human body is an assemblage of a few dollars' worth of assorted chemicals and minerals. Not so, he writes: We're made up of 59 elements, including carbon and oxygen. But, he adds, "who would have thought that we would be incomplete without some molybdenum inside us, or vanadium, manganese, tin, and copper?" Bryson employs the example of an "obliging Benedict Cumberbatch," of medium height and build and good health, to venture that the real cost of a human is "a very precise $ 151,578.46," a figure that turns out to wiggle and wobble as we layer on additional costs. As ever, the author collects lovely oddments and presents them as so many glittering marbles: The largest protein in the body is titin, whose "chemical name is 189,819 letters long, which would make it the longest word in the English language except that dictionaries don't recognize chemical names." The heart, which, Bryson notes, doesn't really look like a valentine, does only one thing: It beats, "slightly more than once every second, about 100,000 times a day, up to 2.5 billion times in a lifetime." Along the way, the author considers whether the old surgical practice of bleeding was really a good thing to do (it wasn't), how "cytokine storms" work, and what the winning combination is for a long life—one factor is wealth: "Someone who is otherwise identical to you but poor...can expect to die between ten and fifteen years sooner." A pleasing, entertaining sojourn into the realm of what makes us tick. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
The author of numerous best sellers, including
Library Journal Reviews
Best known for his travel and history of science books, Bryson (
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Bryson (