The Body Illustrated: A Guide for Occupants

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As ever, the bestselling writer takes a familiar subject and delivers one revelation after another The Irish Mail on Sunday It is a feat of narrative skill to bake so many facts into an entertaining and nutritious book.' - The Daily Telegraph Surprising fact, which had somehow passed me by: women in labor today have the same pain relief options as their great grandmothers. I had particular concerns about his discussions of sex and sex chromosomes, which was so simplified and bad that it pretty much went directly to a TERF place. (The problems start with him saying everyone has two sex chromosomes, and that if you have XX you are always female and if you have XY you are always male, and then they sort of go on from there. Biology is more complicated than your fifth-grade-level overview suggests.) He also manages a neatly internally contradictory discussion of the Death Fat that spans over multiple chapters. (Especially enjoyed him explaining in one chapter some of the reasons humans are fatter today than previously, only to explain in another chapter that we all just eat too much and don’t exercise enough. Also there’s a good bit where he explains that fat is definitely killing everyone early, only to point out a bit later that some of the fattest populations on the planet are also the longest-lived. And so on.) There’s also a fun spot where he describes Alexis St. Martin, who was an intensively mistreated victim of constant unethical experimentation by a physician, as “not the most cooperative of subjects.” There’s a lot of stuff like that, that Bryson lightly glosses over and really, really should not.

A wonderful successor to A Short History of Nearly Everything , this new book is an instant classic. It will have you marvelling at the form you occupy, and celebrating the genius of your existence, time and time again. Skin 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. 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. And with this elegant turn of sentiment, Bryson embarked on a journey of the human body, from top to bottom and from outside in. Despite its subtitle and seeming breadth, it appeared to me to offer limited value as a user's personal handbook. The bulk of The Body instead was evenly divided between being an idiosyncratic assortment of medical characters and scientists and a brief introductory course to anatomy and physiology.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. 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.

Through anecdotes about scientific history and startling facts that seem too extraordinary to be true—the DNA in one person, if stretched out, would measure billions of miles and reach beyond Pluto—Bryson draws the reader into his subject. ... Bryson’s tone is both informative and inviting, encouraging the reader, throughout this exemplary work, to share the sense of wonder he expresses at how the body is constituted and what it is capable of. Publishers' Weekly

You blink fourteen thousand times a day—so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day. Middle-aged Americans are twice as likely to die prematurely than those in Sweden, France, Germany, and the UK. Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast. PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Body__A_Guide_for_Occupants_-_Bill_Bryson.pdf, The_Body__A_Guide_for_Occupants_-_Bill_Bryson.epub A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real-life outside books:

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.” We spend our whole lives in one body and yet most of us have practically no idea how it works and what goes on inside it. The idea of the book is simply to try to understand the extraordinary contraption that is us.’ Over time, the mitochondrial pool for humans has shrunk so much that, almost unbelievably but rather wonderfully, we are all now descended from a single mitochondrial ancestor—a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. You might have heard her referred to as Mitochondrial Eve. She is, in a sense, mother of us all. Regardless, both authors had similar impulses: to communicate science, medicine, history, geography, what-have-you, simply, for anyone to read. It's not controversial to observe that the hallowed world of academia tends to look down upon such works (the implicit argument is that something so ambitious is necessarily a work of synthesis, not research) — but it's fascinating to note that for many, like myself, who ended up in academia, a work like A Short History may just have been a pivotal push in the right direction. The bottom line is that we ended up with brains big enough to handle complex thoughts and vocal tracts uniquely able to articulate them."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 of the United States have done for history; it updates and corrects some common misconceptions that may have been passed on to us at one stage or another. But more often than not, Bryson shies away from story-telling entirely: When discussing heart disease, he writes that "the triggering event for public awareness seems to have been the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt...when he died...the world suddenly seemed to realize that heart disease had become a serious and widespread problem." That's all we get on FDR and this sudden transformation. Where Bryson could replace a gap with an interesting story, he places a period and simply moves on — to more boring subjects. We spend our whole lives in one body and yet most of us have practically no idea how it works and what goes on inside it. The idea of the book is simply to try to understand the extraordinary contraption that is us.' The problem with antibacterial soaps is that they kill good bacteria on your skin as well as bad. The same is true of hand sanitizers The extraordinary story of what we are made of and how we work ... This revelatory book reads as captivatingly as a thriller. Teresa Levonian Cole, Country Life

And no matter who the reader is, it is hard to imagine The Body making the kind of incredible impact that A Short History did, especially in a time when so many wonderful books with similar scope exist. The Body does not rise to the level of Siddhartha Mukherjee's wonderful The Gene, or Henry Gee's Across the Bridge; Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish, or Daniel Lieberman's The Story of the Human Body. The sense of the prosaic overwhelms the ambition of the scope — but perhaps, in a sense, I'm having the same argument I had as a teenager. I like Bryson's less ambitious books more. Only this time, it's not a hard call to make at all. Especially because of the tininess we still have to explore and to discover areas of nano and quanta. Take physics, we don´t know anything, so what could this say about a system as complex as the human body in a world we hardly understand? Photosynthesis in plants seems to do it´s work with something creepy that just can be explained with some kind of not understood quanta phenomena teleportation stuff and, in some rare cases, we are more complex than vegetables.

Most other mammals never suffer strokes, and for those that do it is a rare event. But for humans, it is the second most common cause of death globally, according to the World Health Organization. Why this should be is something of a mystery. I’m aware of Bill Bryson’s penchant to explain the world’s phenomena: See, A Short History of Nearly Everything. This book, The Body, is also a short history of the brilliant workings of our bodily machinery: its systems, functions, diseases, symptoms, and of course, the big sleep. Each chapter is a mini-course in biology, contextualized by key events in history (i.e. discoveries, surgeries, therapies). Things have changed. Today just 18 per cent of Americans smoke and it is easy to think that we have pretty much solved the problem. But it's not quite as simple as that. Nearly one-third of people below the poverty line still smoke, and the habit continues to account for one-fifth of all deaths. It is a problem we are a long way from rectifying.