The Body: A Guide for Occupants - THE SUNDAY TIMES NO.1 BESTSELLER

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Like all of Bryson´s books, it an entertaining and great read, integrating history, medical science and vivid examples that stay in mind and easily find a way to a long term memory whose functioning we don´t understand to associate it with a brain we know nothing about and a mind that,... well, you get the meaning. 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.

The 18th & 19th centuries were very bad....medicine sank into a kind of dark age. You could hardly imagine more misguided and counterproductive practices than those to which physicians became attached in the eighteenth century, and even much of the nineteenth. There is not an organ Bryson describes that is not illuminated by a fun fact or unlikely anecdote. Times 2 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. Do I recommend reading this? Absolutely. Everyone ought to have a primer on themselves. The benefit here is much more than meets the eye, though. So many new discoveries and outright debunking of myths have made it in this text. Recent ones, too. Bryson decided to explain anatomy to the reader as well as giving historical and practical context.My one big takeaway from The Body is that we know almost nothing about the body. We know so much more than we did a hundred years ago, and yet we still know almost nothing. I swear that about ten times in every chapter, there's a comment like "these cells do this, but nobody knows why" or "women are 10x more likely to get this disease than men, but why is anybody's guess". I mean, we spend a third of our lives asleep and no one even knows why we do that.

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.

Retailers:

Every gram of feces you produce contains 40 billion bacteria and 100 million archaea." (Now that's something you can impress your co-workers with at your Christmas party!)