You were issued a body: no manual, no warranty, no return policy, and about 60 percent of it is the same stuff that fills puddles. The Hardware is the manual nobody gave you, covering how each system works, how it fails, and what the evidence says about keeping it running.

The first volume of The Humanual walks through the machine one system at a time: the frame that was designed for walking and is now mostly folded into chairs, the engine room that beats about a hundred thousand times a day without being asked, the defense network that will occasionally declare war on a peanut, and the shutdown sequence you keep trying to skip. Every claim was checked against the research. The myths get corrected, the jokes stay in, and every chapter ends with something you can actually do.

For readers of Bill Bryson's The Body and Mary Roach, and for anyone who has ever wondered whether a noise their body made was normal.

The Humanual is a five-volume series: The Hardware (the body), The Operating System (the mind), The Passengers (other people), The Map (the world you live in) and The Compass (what it is all for). Each volume stands alone.

A note on how it was made: the text is the author's and was fact-checked against primary research. Some cover and interior illustrations were made with AI image tools.