The Body Illustrated: A Guide for Occupants

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According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, the amount of vegetables eaten by the average American between 2000 and 2010 dropped by thirty pounds. That seems an alarming decline until you realize that the most popular vegetable in America by a very wide margin is the French fry. (It accounts for a quarter of our entire vegetable intake.) These days, eating thirty pounds less “vegetables” may well be a sign of an improved diet. You blink fourteen thousand times a day—so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day. In the bestselling, prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making the science of our world both understandable and entertaining to millions of people around the globe. Now he turns his attention inwards to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts and astonishing stories, The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological make up. A wonderful successor to A Short History of Nearly Everything, this book will have you marvelling at the form you occupy, and celebrating the genius of your existence, time and time again. The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson – eBook Details I am joining a book club; unusual for me because I am not a hugely social animal. It is based at the university where I work for one day a week and it meets a lunch time, once every two months. This is the book for January; it’s not something I would have read in normal circumstances.

Have you ever find your school biology textbook, well, literally, funny? Some might say they find it "interesting", but funny? Nah, I don't think anyone would come forward raising his/her hand, giggling and telling how funny their biology book was. Now the good news is: Bill Bryson has come up with one. And in this book, Bryson is absolutely at his best. By 1950, half of the medicines available for prescription had been invented or discovered in just the previous ten years. 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. Or did you know how many things we still cannot explain? One such thing are emotional responses like crying when sad - it has no physiological benefit AND is the same response as for joy so why are we doing it? The bottom line is that we ended up with brains big enough to handle complex thoughts and vocal tracts uniquely able to articulate them."The truth is, it's just not clear who The Body is for. Is it the sort of book targeted to the children bored by textbooks, or is it targeted to the casual adult reader? Is it meant for people who care for and know about the human body, or is it for people who know nothing about it? It is a strange burden to put on a writer to expect an entirely different book than the one that is present, but for many long-time Bryson fans, this may be exactly the conundrum. In America, the daily recommended dose of vitamin E is fifteen milligrams, for instance, but in the U.K. it is three to four milligrams—a very considerable difference. 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. 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. I have read many of the Bill Bryson travel books over the years and a couple of the more static ones as well. This, of course, is a sort of travel book - just travelling around the body rather than a country.

Bryson rummages about in our vital organs, emerging with a parade of fascinating facts. Daily Mirror As ever, the author takes a logical approach to his subject as he gradually works his way around the body - educating and entertaining as he goes.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.”

As well as conveying a huge bundle of facts in a fascinating fashion, Bryson also makes his readers laugh. I love this guy's sense of humour. That eased off a bit towards the end as he started talking about the body in old age. I possess a 69-year-old body, and I quaked a bit when I learnt the degree to which us older folk are more prone to problems. I presumed that I knew that already, but to see it so clearly laid out in print is daunting. For instance "An eighty-year-old person is a thousand times more likely than a teenager to develop cancer." Whaaaaaat? Although he doesn't dwell overly on the negatives of being elderly, the book nevertheless brings home to you with a thump some of the downsides of ageing. 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. We are darn well amazing. We've all heard that rather gooey truth "We are all made of stardust..." but read this book, and you will learn even more extraordinary truths. We are phenomenal creatures. If you aren't filled with a fantastic sense of wonder whilst reading this then pinch yourself hard, because something is missing. The great paradox of the brain is that everything you know about the world is provided to you by an organ that has itself never seen that world. The brain exists in silence and darkness, like a dungeoned prisoner. It has no pain receptors, literally no feelings. It has never felt warm sunshine or a soft breeze. To your brain, the world is just a stream of electrical pulses, like taps of Morse code. And out of this bare and neutral information it creates for you—quite literally creates—a vibrant, three-dimensional, sensually engaging universe. Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding.” Book Genre: Biology, Health, History, Humor, Medical, Medicine, Nonfiction, Popular Science, ScienceA directory of wonders. Extraordinary stories about the heart, lungs, genitals [...] plus some anger and life advice – all delivered in the inimitable Bryson style" of adult Americans—about 100 million—experience chronic pain at any given time. It affects more people than cancer, heart disease, and diabetes combined. Almost 3/4ths of prescriptions written each year are for conditions that can’t be cured with antibiotics (like bronchitis).

A study in Switzerland found that flu virus can survive on a banknote for two and a half weeks if it is accompanied by a microdot of snot.” A joy to read ... every paragraph contains at least one startling, even awe-inspiring fact ... Infused with an infectious sense of wonder at the miraculousness of it all. Reader's Digest 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. 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). 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. The ideal gift for readers of every age who wish to discover more about themselves.Bryson's deadpan wit existed side by side with some very gross descriptions of past medical research. So beware if you're squeamish or planning to eat. Bryson mentioned many scientists in the context of Nobel prize winners, both the worthy and the slighted, those robbed by unscrupulous bosses or by ignorant skepticism. Many of these stories were quite old, but they made me realize that our medical advances have been relatively recent, within the past 60 years or so. 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.)