The Body Illustrated: A Guide for Occupants

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Classic, wry, gleeful Bryson... richly interesting... an entertaining and absolutely fact-rammed book. If it sells hundreds of thousands of copies, like the last one, it will be no bad thing.' * Sunday Times * You’d marinate in this book over time versus absorbing it one sitting. There are too many disparate facts to internalize all at once. You’d “escape into” this book when you’re desirous of the knowledge and insights that should reawaken your curiosity of life as we know it. Our “lifestyle diseases” a/k/a “mismatch diseases” (i.e. heart disease or diabetes caused by indolent or overindulgent lifestyles) have surpassed diseases of infection or genetics. A more scientific, and more recent, U.S. National Health and Social Life Survey found that 15 percent of married women and 25 percent of married men said they had been unfaithful at some time.

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. 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. Science, it's history, trials and errors but also impressive feats from hundreds of years ago, groundbreaking discoveries (the most well-known example being penicillin), modern appliances and procedures but also problems that will become more dangerous in the near future ... I was delighted how Bryson presented it all comprehensibly and explained it in a way every layman can understand, often giving examples from every-day occurrences, always showing just how much he is fascinated by the subject(s) himself.But as the title suggests, outright occupancy usually comes with a rental charge. The bill always comes due. The extraordinary story of what we are made of and how we work ... This revelatory book reads as captivatingly as a thriller. Teresa Levonian Cole, Country Life Surprisingly, the least effective way to spread germs (according to yet another study) is kissing. It proved almost wholly ineffective among volunteers at the University of Wisconsin who had been successfully infected with cold virus. Sneezes and coughs weren’t much better. The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch. It is a feat of narrative skill to bake so many facts into an entertaining and nutritious book.' - The Daily Telegraph Antibiotics are about as nuanced as a hand grenade. They wipe out good microbes as well as bad. Increasing evidence shows that some of the good ones may never recover, to our permanent cost. Most people in the Western world, by the time they reach adulthood, have received between five and twenty courses of antibiotics. The effects, it is feared, may be cumulative, with each generation passing on fewer microorganisms than the one before.

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). There is not an organ Bryson describes that is not illuminated by a fun fact or unlikely anecdote. TIMES 2 Bill Bryson is an intelligent man and proficient at being able to read scientific information then put it into terms that a general reader will find interesting (and understand!). He does this in a way that includes the reader, always respecting them and without being patronising. 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. Middle-aged Americans are twice as likely to die prematurely than those in Sweden, France, Germany, and the UK.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.

Bryson feeds the pith, pulp and bitter pips of a subject into his brain and produces a sweet, zingy quantity of juice – this book is a delight."

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There are about 7,000 rare diseases. (1 in 17 people have rare diseases—which does not seem “rare.”). 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.