As someone who's had a lot of health problems over the years, reading about medical stuff is always interesting. However, sometimes science writing can be super dry and a bit boring. I'm happy to report that this book was absolutely fascinating! The only downside is that there were so many interesting facts that I can't possibly remember now that I'm done reading it.

Bryson covers basically every part of the human body, in chapters ranging from "The Brain" to "Nerves and Pain." Each section includes history and biographical information from some of medicine's most influential and significant players, plus background on how the systems and parts of our bodies work. Pretty much every sentence was something I had never learned before. Bryson writes with a wry humor that I also really enjoyed - it brought extra verve to the pages.

There were so many elements of this book that I'm still thinking about. For example, how strong our teeth are - think about how you can crush an ice cube with your teeth but not with your fist! Or how chemotherapy is basically a form of mustard gas that was discovered after usage in WWII. It's crazy to think about how most of the medical discoveries that have taken place over the last several hundred years were complete accidents or just dumb luck.

My mind is still completely blown from reading this, and I'm so glad I did!

This was a super interesting book. Any nonfiction book that can hold the attention of someone who professes not to like non-fiction, must be a pretty good book. Of course, most anything by Bill Bryson is a good book. I would probably read his grocery lists and find them fascinating.

A super interesting overview of all of the major systems in the body. It touched on all of the big things while still going in depth enough that I felt like I was able to learn and have jumping off points for further research. Super accessible and interesting.

The past two years have definitely given most of us the opportunity to think about our own mortality and how our bodies work (or don't work). That makes this book the perfect read for the times. It's filled with a lot of fun, and not so fun facts, as well as answers to questions you may have been having. "When Things Go Wrong" is not for the faint of heart. Highly recommended!

Bill Bryson is one of the non-fiction writers today. He really knows how to reach his audience and keeps you interested. This book is no exception. I recommend it!

Published by Doubleday on October 15, 2019

“We are the only creatures that cry from feelings, so far as we can tell. Why we do so is another of life’s many mysteries.” My takeaway from Bill Bryson’s The Body is that medical science is perplexed by the mysteries of the human body. Almost as soon as scientists believe they have discovered something true about our physical containers, the truth turns out to be false. From balancing the body’s humors with leeches to using lobotomies as a cure for headaches, the history of medical science is a history of getting it wrong. Unfortunately, modern scientists are just as apt to be mistaken, although modern doctors are a bit less likely to base deadly treatments on ignorance.

Some of the body’s mysteries are inherent in evolution. The Body makes clear that humans are not the product of intelligent design. Our bodies are largely the product of evolutionary workarounds. Yet evolution is nothing if not mysterious. Zebra fish regrow damaged heart tissue. Humans don’t. Seems like pretty poor planning for an intelligent designer.

Bryson explores the body in enough detail to cause the reader to marvel at its workings, but not in so much detail as to create a multi-volume text. He examines skin and bones, organs (the brain and heart, liver and kidneys, lungs and guts), the neurological system, and cellular biology. He points out the many ways in which the body acts as a factory, producing chemicals that scientists don’t understand or misunderstand until they develop a working theory about their importance — a theory that will probably be subject to wholesale revision a few years later.

Bryson discusses food and how we experience taste before our bodies convert it to fuel. He considers cancer and other diseases, as well as the checkered history of medicine. He examines ever-changing opinions about exercise and conflicting experiences about the need for sleep. Naturally, he takes a look at reproduction, without which there would be no more bodies, and sex, without which there would be no reproduction.

Bryson is nothing if not informative. He explains why ATP (the chemical adenosine triphosphate) is “the most important thing in your body you have never heard of.” He provides miniaturized biographies of scientists who made crucial contributions to the human understanding of the mind and body, only to be undercut in their time or overshadowed by scientists who stole their work.

Some of Bryson’s most interesting paragraphs remind us how science is always at war with profit. When a biochemist in the 1950s reported a clear connection between the high intake of trans fats and clogged arteries, his work was disparaged by lobbyists for the food processing industry. More than 50 years passed before the American Heart Association recognized that correlation and nearly 75 years went by before the FDA stood up to food producers and declared excessive consumption of trans fats to be unsafe.

Bryson reports his findings with good humor, although perhaps with less charm than some of his earlier books. He notes that sex may be biologically unnecessary, given the number of organisms that have abandoned it as a reproductive strategy. Geckos have done away with males altogether. He considers it “a slightly unsettling thought if you are a man” that “what we bring to the reproductive party is easily dispensed with.”

On a more serious note, although this is a pre-pandemic book, Bryson talks about how much risk the human race faces from the rapid spread of disease. If Ebola were a less efficient killer, Bryson notes, it would not strike such panic into communities and would make it easier for afflicted individuals to mingle, allowing it to spread farther and endanger more people. His discussion seems prescient, given the spread of Covid-19.

Bryson’s knack is for communicating a wealth of complex information in digestible morsels that readers who don’t have an M.D. or a PhD in a biological science can comprehend. He engages in storytelling, explaining how scientists stumbled across or misunderstood facts and how their mistakes became part of the medical canon until it became impossible to ignore scientific findings that contradicted them. The information in The Body is a bit overwhelming, but the book’s true value lies in reminding the reader that medical science is constantly improving its knowledge of what makes us tick, and that our current certainties are likely to be replaced by more accurate knowledge tomorrow.

RECOMMENDED

I received an arc of this title from NetGalley for an honest review. I skimmed our copy of this book but Bill Bryson knows how to write and I found myself immediately sucked into this book. Some really interesting stuff about our bodies and what they can do it here.

For a scientific book about the human body , that is long and heavy, The Body is fascinating and very readable. It's a good one to pick up and go through in any order the reader wants and would be welcome on the 'shelf next to dictionaries and encyclopedias. We loved it.

Bryson does it again! He has a wonderful ability to make any history engaging and this view of The Body was no different.

Great overview of the human body and all of its complexities presented in Bryson's usual engaging voice. Highly recommend!

Ever since reading Bill Bryson’s “Notes From A Small Island” about his perceptions as an American traveling around the UK several decades ago and his examination of the English language in “The Mother Tongue” also many years ago, I have been a fan of Bryson’s books and have tried to read them all as they were published. Bryson has a unique and witty way of seeing the world around him and writing about it. And he has written about so many interesting topics over the years in such a witty manner!

On October 15, 2019, his book entitled “The Body: A Guide for Occupants” was published in hardcover format. The advanced reader’s manuscript that I was sent slipped between the cracks, and I am ashamed to just now post my slightly altered professional review of the book. It was an excellent book and I hope this review generates new interest in the book. What the tardiness of this review will add is a statement that it was interesting to reread the book after the pandemic of 2020-21. Bryson would have written a few things differently if the book had been published now rather than the fall of 2019, but it is still great reading and you will learn a lot from it.

This book is full of very readable facts about myriad aspects of the human body. I learned A LOT from it, and was reminded of a lot of things I had forgotten. And I will be more knowledgeable about my health and decisions about it with information that I learned from this book. This information is a good thing to have now that I am entering the older phase of my life when I can’t take my body and good health quite as much for granted as I did in my younger days, ha, ha. :-)

The book is extremely well documented in terms of where all of the facts and research comes from which is always important when one is reading nonfiction.

This excerpt from Chapter 1 gives you an idea of how entertainingly Bryson shares some these facts and research with you:

“We pass our existence within this warm wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted. How many among us know even roughly where the spleen is or what it does? Or the difference between tendons and ligaments? Or what our lymph nodes are up to? How many times a day do you suppose you blink? Five hundred? A thousand? You’ve no idea, of course. Well, you blink fourteen thousand times a day—so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day. Yet you never have to think about it, because every second of every day your body undertakes a literally unquantifiable number of tasks—a quadrillion, a nonillion, a quindecillion, a vigintillion (these are actual measures), at all events some number vastly beyond imagining—without requiring an instant of your attention.

In the second or so since you started this sentence, your body has made a million red blood cells. They are already speeding around you, coursing through your veins, keeping you alive. Each of those red blood cells will rattle around you about 150,000 times, repeatedly delivering oxygen to your cells, and then, battered and useless, will present itself to other cells to be quietly killed off for the greater good of you.

Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion (that’s 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you. No one can say why those 7 billion billion billion have such an urgent desire to be you. They are mindless particles, after all, without a single thought or notion between them. Yet somehow for the length of your existence, they will build and maintain all the countless systems and structures necessary to keep you humming, to make you you, to give you form and shape and let you enjoy the rare and supremely agreeable condition known as life.

That’s a much bigger job than you realize. Unpacked, you are positively enormous. Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast. The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around Earth. The most remarkable part of all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid). You have a meter of it 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. Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic.”

Besides examining our body and how it works, Bryson also explores other topics that are logical progressions of thought like: what happens when things go wrong (with interesting facts about what people once died of and at what age, and how that has changed over the decades), and, he mentions the unsung (and known) heroes of medicine and their discoveries that have had a powerful impact on the medical care that we receive today.

I highly recommend this book and thank the publisher Doubleday/Anchor and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book and for allowing me to review it. I also recommend you purchasing the paperback edition which was published on January 26, 2021 and contains a new afterward for this edition.

Things I said to myself while reading The Body by Bill Bryson. “Really? I didn’t know that. That is so interesting.”
In The Body, Bryson breaks down various parts of our brilliant, and sometimes mysterious, bodies in an easy to understand, thoughtful and entertaining way.

He talks about how viruses spread, what happens when we sleep, medical breakthroughs in history, how vaccines work, and so much more.

Going in, I wondered if this book would trigger health anxiety. For the most part, it made me feel pretty good about how our bodies function and how far medicine has come. There are so many fascinating details and intriguing case studies.

One of my favorite quotes from the book:

“True smiles are brief—between two-thirds of a second and four seconds. That’s why a held smile begins to look menacing. A true smile is one expression that we cannot fake.”

Many of Bill Bryson's fans first became familiar with his work through his autobiographical travel books, such as Notes from a Small Island or A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. Bryson also famously delved into the world of science in A Short History of Nearly Everything, which breaks down scientific fields such as chemistry and biology so that the lay person finds them fascinating and entertaining. The Body: A Guide for Occupants marks the author's reentry into popular science. With his characteristic wit, he takes his readers on a survey of anatomy that successfully outlines what makes us human.

Bryson begins with a brief examination of what chemically makes up a person, and then he drills down to the workings of specific body parts and systems, such as the head or the digestive system. He later touches on the less physical aspects of being human, from sleep to sexuality, and he ends by considering how our bodies ultimately break down. While there is some order to the book's structure, with overarching chapters like "The Head," "The Guts" and "Nerves and Pain," each of these is wide ranging and encompasses an amazing range of subjects tangentially related to the main focus.

Bryson is a master at making arcane information accessible to a broad audience and keeping that audience engrossed from start to finish. Every page is jam-packed with interesting trivia that is fun to share with others. I constantly found myself turning to my husband and saying, "Huh⁠—here's something cool⁠—let me read you this paragraph!" The material Bryson presents ranges from obscure facts about the body (we blink about 14,000 times a day, so much that a person's eyes are closed for 23 minutes of every waking day) to things that make sense that most people just haven't thought about (unlike other organs of the body, the skin never fails) to intriguing bits of history that are not well known (the modern species of penicillin is descended from a single moldy cantaloupe).

What keeps the book from being a dry recitation of anatomy trivia is Bryson's light touch with the subject matter; he injects the text with wit at every turn:

"Many authorities (for which possibly read 'science majors who don't have a date on a Friday') have tried at various times, mostly for the purposes of amusement, to compute how much it would cost in materials to build a human."

"It's a little ironic that two of the lightest things in nature, oxygen and hydrogen, when combined form one of the heaviest [water], but that's nature for you."

"Incidentally, the idea that we use only 10 percent of our brains is a myth…You may not use it all terribly sensibly, but you employ all your brain in one way or another."

"You are 70% more likely to die from heart disease today than you were in 1900. That's partly because other things used to kill people first, and partly because a hundred years ago people didn't spend five or six hours an evening in front of a television with a big spoon and a tub of ice cream."

For more trivia about the body see Beyond the Book.

The downside to The Body is that there's no overarching narrative that ties all the fascinating parts together. There's consequently nothing to keep one reading "just one more chapter" late into the night, and there's simply too much information to absorb to move quickly through the book. This is a slow read, and one designed for sharing but not necessarily discussing or debating; it likely would not make a good selection for a book group.

Regardless, Bryson very likely has another hit on his hands. I've read everything he has written and believe it to be far and away his best work to date. It will certainly appeal to his ever-growing fan base and delight anyone who enjoys acquiring new information about a topic they think they know well; it would also make an ideal gift book for the trivia lover.

This book is very much in a similar style to Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." It explains in plain language a lot about how the human body works, and how people learned about it.

“The Body” by Bill Bryson was a fun, breezily educational read, full of entertaining, weird, and scary facts about the human body. Bryson’s style lends itself to teaching without the reader feeling lectured to, even if the final message is: eat less, exercise more and be kind to other humans.

Another wonderful book by Bill Bryson. I wasn't sure I was going to like the subject matter as it was very different from his usual travel books but I was wonderfully surprised. The book was full of information, told with his usual sense of dry humor that kept me fascinated. So many things I did not know. Also his section on viruses was very interesting reading during the pandemic and spot on. The topic was very well researched with many amusing anecdotes. Highly recommend.

I had body fatigue after finishing this one. I was quite tired of hearing about the human body, particularly since it clearly is for a shallow understanding of the body's workings and I was already fairly aware. I also found a number of errors or details that are not wholly agreed upon in the scientific world to be included. Overall, this may work for someone with little knowledge of biology/human anatomy etc. or someone who loves the topic, but I am neither of those people.

P.S. I really miss Bryson's funny NF rather than his more recent works.

This is a very readable and fascinating crash-course in the often bizarre human body. I've never read Bill Bryson before, but I will definitely check out his other titles now. He explains things in ways that make sense and has a way of finding the most interesting bits of information to share.

If you loved Bill Bryson's "The History of Nearly Everything," then you will love this book about the human body.

It took me a while to finish, but I enjoyed every chapter.

He admits that he could have devoted half of the book to the brain.
Instead, he devotes only one chapter to it and sprinkles brain-related issues throughout the book.

It's classic Bryson: light humor sprinkled on many stories.

You won't just learn about how the liver works or how cancer destroys you, but you'll learn the surprising and odd stories behind the scientists who discovered the truths we know.

And as always, Bryson loves to remind the reader how much we do NOT know.

It should be required reading for anyone with a body.

The Body by Bill Bryson uses the word miracle ten times. This is a book not about faith but yet centered on the idea of a miracle. As with Bill Bryson's other books, this one has very much the feel of a journey through the body. For a reader in a non-scientific profession, this book finds the perfect balance of being easy to read yet full of well researched, scientific information. For me, this "trip" through the human body is well worth the time.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2020/04/the-body-guide-for-occupants.html

Reviewed for NetGalley.