User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
I went into this book with the attitude of "of course, Bill Bryson can make anything interesting", but I was still a little unsure if this was the right book for me. There are definitely interesting aspects of the body, but I'm more of a "fun fact here, quirky tidbit there" kinda person. I wasn't sure I wanted to read a whole book full of words I can't pronounce. But, no, Bill Bryson really can make anything interesting.
His usual charismatic, undemanding style is all over this book. He begins with the head and takes us all the way through the physiology of the human body. The organs, systems, various proteins and bacterium that I will never remember the name of. What really makes this interesting is that he links each part of the body in with the history of medicine and diseases relating to that part. He pulls out little anecdotes that shocked me, infuriated me, and often made me laugh.
Bryson knows he isn't writing a book for medical professionals here. There's a certain amount of depth in some chapters, but it feels like a lot is probably skimmed over so us laymen can wrap our heads around the information. And, frankly, it wouldn't be nearly as readable if that wasn't the case.
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.
I like how Bryson looks at health and disease across the world and not just in the United States and Europe. Though the U.S. comes out of this looking even worse than I would have anticipated. Despite spending more on healthcare per person than any other country, U.S. citizens die younger and have higher rates of chronic disease, depression, drug abuse, homicide, and HIV than almost all (if not all) developed nations. There are a number of theories why, though no one knows for sure.
If you like Bryson's previous books, you should like this one. It's pop science, and more fun than it is ground-breaking, but as long as you're not planning to use it as your handbook for experimental surgery, then I see nothing wrong with that.
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Rating: really liked it
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 highlighted many pages, so I’ll just offer a few highlights here.
The thing I found fascinating was reading about our skin, the 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.”
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.
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 marked “organic.” This 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.
Rating: really liked it
This was actually really good!
Highly recommend it if the topic interested you, the audiobook was also great!
Rating: really liked it
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 worry! There may be a time or two that he throws some deeper tidbits in, but it always moves on quickly. A good balance to keep both a med student and the layman interested (just guessing on the med student side as I am most certainly the layman!)
So – yay, trivia!
However, I will have to say, more often than not, the book journeys off in the direction of what can go wrong with the body. This is not surprising as a lot can go wrong with the body. However, it is not a book to read while eating, if you have hypochondria, if you have germ phobia, if the word “parasite” gives you heebie-jeebies, etc. While it may all be true, perhaps somethings are better off left unknown!
With these two things in mind, proceed at your own risk! If you love trivia and don’t mind dumbed down science, this should be perfect for you. If you are a doctor, it may be too simple of an explanation to satisfy – or, maybe not??? If you are easily queasy when it comes to blood, vomit, and other bodily fluids and functions, I would suggest passing on this one.
But, when all is said and done, another decent book from Bryson!
Rating: really liked it
(Throwback review) If you are in quarantine due to Covid-19 and if you want to read just one book, this is the one you should pick.
Chapter 20 (When things go wrong) in this book is a must-read one as it is perfectly explaining the current scenario we are facing.
This book will help us know more about our body, which might enable us to appreciate its uniqueness even when challenged it is to the extreme by a virus.I read this book amid all the pandemonium I had to face as a Doctor and, more importantly, as a human being. I will share the last paragraph of chapter 20 (page 335) due to its current relevance.
" The fact is we are really no better prepared for a bad outbreak today than we were when Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people a hundred years ago. The reason we haven't had another experience like that isn't because we have been especially vigilant. It's because we have been lucky."
Well, it seems that we can't write that sentence again.
Rating: really liked it
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, that´s no wonder. We deliberately build in design flaws in everything we create and call it planned obsolescence and what is an appendix or other useless extra bonus parts compared to that.
We really don´t understand anything in detail as shown in many great examples and the cool thing is that we once again stand in front of an ocean of lack of knowledge with that stereotypical hand full of sand and much that we believe to know about our body today might turn out to be completely different or even wrong.
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.
The most interesting implication of hidden dept comes for the mind, brain, conscience and ego. When over 1 billion copies of this book could be stored in an area of the cerebral cortex the size of a grain of sand, there is pretty much space for unknown programs running in the background, possibly with programming and instructions from wherever and whomever.
Because we don´t understand, we should treat the body as good as possible with a diet of things and thoughts of which we know that they are not harmful
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.
It´s better and more informative than biology education and in my imagination I see books like this in a close future with much more data, pictures, animations, links of different grade of difficulty for each kind of reader, VR, AR and the integration of the reading audience, probably with a kinda collective reading live streams while using different kinds of technologies or just old school reading.
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real-life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science...
Tropes show how literature is conceived and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
Rating: really liked it
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 about the human body. Whether you want to know about bones or skin or digestion, muscles or brains or bacteria, you'll find it in this book. I don't even know where to begin in telling you about the contents. Whilst some things I already knew and thus this was a refresher, there were even more that I didn't know and thus made my brain very happy. There are just
so many interesting facts wrapped up in this book. A random few from my highlights:
•"You have a meter of [DNA] packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto."
•We shed over a million flakes of skin every hour, leaving behind about a pound of dust every year. (Easy way to rid yourself of a pound, but for some reason I've never seen it in a diet book.)
•If you could ice skate on cartilage, you would go 16 times as fast as on ice, due to the smoothness of cartilage.
•"In the second or so since you started this sentence, your body has made a million red blood cells." (and used a dozen muscles just to read these words)
•"The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around Earth."
•"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!)
•The "the death rate for infectious diseases has been climbing and is back to the level of about forty years ago." This is due to bacteria evolving resistance to our antibiotics, partly because of the copious amounts of antibiotics that are fed to livestock (a good reason to cut out meat and dairy!) and the over-prescription of antibiotics, especially for illnesses that are not helped by them (please stop asking your doctor for antibiotics for colds!).
The award for my
favourite tidbit of information in this book goes to:
•All of your skin colour is in "a sliver of skin about a millimeter thick".
Did you get that?? ALL of the pigment in your skin is in a sliver so thin that you can
see through it! "That’s all that race is—a sliver of epidermis." For
this we have enslaved millions of people, killed, hated, treated unfairly, imprisoned. For a translucent sliver of skin. Stupid reason if you ask me, especially when you consider that if you go back far enough, every single person on earth has ancestors who came from Africa. We ALL had black ancestors. We ALL came from Africa. The original skin colour of homo sapiens was dark, so stop already. Stop hating on people over a sliver of skin. If you have "white" skin, it's due to a gene
mutation, a freak gene that happened to get passed on because our ancestors needed Vitamin D after they left Africa. Not because you are somehow superior to people who have more melanin than you. Got that?
Those are just a few of the many things I highlighted in this book (it's best to have a Kindle copy if you don't like marking up paper pages). If you enjoy learning new things, if you like to know what makes you you, or if you have an extra $151,578.46 on hand and want to know the ingredients required to create a human body, this is the book for you!
Rating: really liked it
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’.
Rating: really liked it
I read this off and on for over a week, I think reading it straight through would not have left me time to ponder the information and possibly would have been a case of too much at one time. Our bodies, many systems and other developments of which I knew little all in one book. I actually own a copy because this is another that I feel deserves more than read. Or at least to have as a reference.
There is a huge amount of research that went into this book. Bryson is good and picking out information and identifying unsung, unknown heroes. As informative and as I found it, it seems Bryson has traded his trademark sit for some gross examples. Thankfully, I have never encountered these relatively rare conditions. Shuddered at all the diseases, viruses we don't get, there were quite a few. Our body is quite a compact and intricate mechanism. It's a wonder that more things don't go wrong.
I still have two unread by this author that I'm saving for a book drought, along with books from a few other favored author. This is an author loved by many, and he explains our bodies in an easy to understand fashion. Though I did miss the humor , of which there was some, but not as many instances as in previous books. Definitely worth reading, regardless.
Rating: really liked it
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 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.
Bryson's
dry wit will come across even more clearly when this is eventually made into an
audiobook. 
While reading, I imagined Alton Brown reading the text in the same manner he talks to the audience in Good Eats. Bill Nye would be a great narrator, too!
It's clear that The Body is
aimed at a general audience. (Readers who specialize in the biological sciences might want more detail than this book provides.)
One caveat, particularly for Goodreads reviewers--more than our fair share of us have had frustrating or scary "adventures" through the medical system. Since Bryson spends a surprising amount of time discussing the things doctors *don't* know, this aspect of the text could be unsettling.
Four stars for the print version--and if the audiobook is available when you're making your purchasing decision, I would definitely give this a listen.
Thanks to Doubleday and NetGalley for my DRC of this book, which will be available for purchase on October 15th.
Rating: really liked it
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 playing out within. "
--Dr. A. Zuger
https://undark.org/2019/12/06/quirky-...
Rating: really liked it
A book that tells our body in layman's terms. The author makes it simple to read and understand this book.
I like these words:
“Exercise regularly. Eat sensibly. Die anyway.”
Anyway, I agree that quality of life is the priority, hopefully, most of the time we are living happily and healthy.
I recommend you to read this book so that we know more about our bodies and the functionality of most of our body organs.
We should keep and maintain our bodies healthy always.
Rating: really liked it
People who should read this: those who really, really enjoy book reports. People who should absolutely not read this: trans people, people with chronic pain, fat people, anyone with a degree in any aspect of biology, anyone who reads more than one popular science book a year.
The thing is, there are basically three ways you can go with a book like this. There’s the complete and in-depth approach, which is absolutey ruled out here; you can’t cover the human body completely in four years of medical school, never mind in a single book. Then there’s the fun facts approach, which Mary Roach has absolutely perfected; you give a brief overview and then you delve into interesting and possibly amusing things your reader probably doesn’t know. That’s where I thought this was going. And then there’s the massively oversimplified, somewhat dull book report, and that’s where this unfortunately ended up. This reads like Bryson read approximately 400 books, summarized each one in a single page, and then added an introduction and a conclusion.
And that’s a problem. The reason each of those books was written was that their topics could not be adequately covered in a page. So every time I happened upon an area about which I already knew some things — or when I’d read the same book Bryson had for that particular bit — I found myself hissing, “But you’re MISSING THE POINT” or “But that’s — that’s so superficial it’s actually inaccurate” or just “Seriously? Seriously??”
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.
When the book’s not enraging, it’s just dull. Bryson mostly elides his own narrative voice, which is his main strength as a writer, in favor of pretending to be an authority, so we get an endless dull recitation of facts that many readers already know. (And many of which we learned from more engaging books than this one.)
This book left me sad and frustrated and took me so long to slog through it messed up my holds at the library. A solid loser, all the way around.
Rating: really liked it
The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson is a well-researched user’s manual for anyone interested in how our bodies function. And, of course, we also have the opportunity to enjoy the Bryson wit. This is a field trip through the human body and I was astounded at the level of research needed to write such a book. And I admit there was so much I did not know about the body and how it is built to repair itself. This is an informative guide as well as a source of humour, now and again. Read it for the pure pleasure of enjoying one more Bryson book. Highly recommended.
Rating: really liked it
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.
