Mr. Bryson’s latest book is a Baedeker of the human body, a fact-studded survey of our physiques, inside and out. Many authors have produced such guides in recent years, and some of them are very good. But none have done it quite so well as Mr. Bryson, who writes better, is more amusing and has greater mastery of his material than anyone else ... Mr. Bryson is a master explainer, with a gift for the pithy simile and all-encompassing metaphor ... Mr. Bryson’s love of language is often on display, and he can’t resist occasional indulgences on the origins of terms medical and anatomical ... Mr. Bryson’s account is enlivened by his excellent command of the history of medicine ... Mr. Bryson is brisk, provocative and entertaining throughout. As he covers vast realms of anatomy, physiology and medicine in this book, you might expect it to be rife with errors, but I am only able to find two.
One of the strengths of Bryson’s delightful new book, The Body, is that it reveals the thousands of rarely acknowledged tasks our body takes care of as we go about our day ... The overall result is informative, entertaining and often gross ... Bryson particularly excels at ferreting out unsung heroes ... Bryson, who gives off a Cronkite-like trustworthy vibe, is good at allaying fears and busting myths ... If there’s one part of this book everyone should read, it’s the five pages on the antibiotic crisis. It will light up your amygdala.
It’s unlikely I will ever be the subject of a book-length biography. So here’s the next best thing: a likely bestseller all about me. Of course it’s also all about you, which takes a little of the shine off it. On the other hand, you and I would never have a biographer who writes in such loving detail about every facet of our physique: from skull to toenails; dawn halitosis to midnight insomnia; conception to cremation ... Bill Bryson isn’t a medic, biologist or psychiatrist, but that’s what makes his exploration of the human body, all seven billion billion billion atoms of it (the book is rich in jaw-dropping stats), so readable and useful. As with his earlier A Short History of Nearly Everything, which offers a non-specialist introduction to science, he asks all the questions a layperson doesn’t dare to ask for fear of exposing humiliating ignorance, then answers them in witty, jargon-free prose that glides you through 400 pages. It’s fun to read because it’s not just comprehensive, but quirky.
This sequel tries to do for the body, and medicine, what [A Short History of Nearly Everything] did for science: to tell you everything you should have known already, fill you with wonder and make you laugh. It mostly works. Bryson has a sharp eye for a weird fact — though, like the stereotypical Midwesterner, he is impressed by sheer size and scale. The 25 sextillion molecules of oxygen in every exhalation, the 8,000 diseases that can kill us, and so on ... Bryson’s own turn of phrase remains vivid and pleasing ... Bryson likes to debunk popular medical myths. Antioxidant supplements do not slow ageing. We do not lose most of our heat through the head, only about 2%. Men do not think about sex every seven seconds, more like once an hour. And so on, and wonderfully on ... The book is richly interesting, then. It is just not as funny as I’d hoped, at least not funny as often as I had hoped. The balance of content is also a bit awry ... For all that, this is 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.
... hugely enlightening and entertaining ... Having described the physical nature of our world and beyond, from the atomic to the intergalactic, in The Body [Bryson] now turns inward to explain — in his lucid, amusing style — what we’re made of. Along the way, as he has before, he weaves in stories of the astonishing characters who have been figuring humans out ... draws on dozens of experts and a couple hundred books to carry the reader from outside to inside, from up to down and from miraculous operational efficiencies to malignant mayhem when things go awry ... Despite the body’s harrowing malfunctions, you will marvel at the brilliance and vast weirdness of your design.
Sometimes it’s in meanderings that the book is at its best. It looks at why bipedalism made us who we are yet gives us so much back pain and finds out how your memory is a bit like a Wikipedia page because you can go in and edit it, but so can other people. The section on the human brain alone is, pardon the pun, mind-opening ... It even touches briefly on peripheral topics such as the lack of gender balance in almost every medical trial in history ... The Body also gives you tonnes of things you can read aloud to amaze and irritate your loved ones (yes, of course I did) like the fact that cartilage has a friction coefficient five times that of ice ... Bryson isn’t a scientist, which makes his achievement in corralling so much diverse information here even more impressive ... If I have any problems with The Body (they are few), more than once he starts to delve into a subject area that seems like it could be fascinating only to jump straight out again. Frustrating I suppose, but part of the nature of trying to cram so much into such a relatively small and accessible book ... Ultimately, The Body is 464 pages of sometimes breathtaking information held together by a familiarly cosy storytelling style.
Bryson’s The Body is a directory of such wonders, a tour of the minuscule; it aims to do for the human body what his A Short History of Nearly Everything did for science. He has waded through a PhD’s worth of articles, interviewed a score of physicians and biologists, read a library of books, and had a great deal of fun along the way. There’s a formula at work – the prose motors gleefully along, a finely tuned engine running on jokes, factoids and biographical interludes ... For all Bryson’s encyclopedic reading, his brain-picking sessions with medicine’s finest minds, the ultimate conclusions of his book could stand as an ultimate prescription for life: eat a little bit less, move a little bit more.
... a congeries of anecdotes, skillfully strung, always a pleasure to read but seldom earthshakingly significant ... the author collects lovely oddments and presents them as so many glittering marbles ... A pleasing, entertaining sojourn into the realm of what makes us tick.
A fairly straightforward traipse through organs or organ systems, The Body is the sort of book that makes one wonder how it is that Bryson lost his magic touch in making very big books transcend the common textbook. Oftentimes during The Body, it's unclear what exactly makes Bryson feel that the words of a living scientist or two per chapter are sufficient to enthrall the reader more than an introductory human biology textbook would. If anything, the way The Body moves along, it makes one wish there were sub-headings and diagrams — things textbooks have. So, what happened? ... Perhaps what's missing most is Bryson's characteristic wit and ingenious ways of analysis. There is a little of both ... What The Body is left with, then, is a heavy sense of didacticism, and a pedestrian tone of unrelenting pomp and hyperbole so common in popular science books that aim to make everything about scientific discovery seem just awesome. There are glimmers of hope when Bryson uses quirky, fascinating stories ... The tendency to abandon fruitful threads can be infuriating ... 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 ... And no matter who the reader is, it is hard to imagine The Body making the kind of incredible impact that A Short History did, especially in a time when so many wonderful books with similar scope exist.
... is not by any means a myopic view, for that would be anathema to the Bryson style. The Body is expansive, a panorama of stories about people, history, medicine, and yes, body parts. It is a packed with delightful nuggets alongside startling statistics and intriguing facts. In fact, the work is so compressed with interest and detail that reading it straight through only one time does the book a great disservice ... Things that are glossed over or buried in countless esoteric science journals are here delivered with clarity and aplomb ... has a keen knack for unearthing the forgotten wonders of health and medicine ... A complaint, if one be had, is that The Body becomes so interesting in parts that a reader will feel compelled to share, share, and share again. Thus, the review shall close with a SIDE EFFECT DICLAIMER: The Body may have a negative impact on friends and family due to a compelling desire for a reader to share an abundance of TMI. Ultimately, Bryson has produced a compelling, overly engaging work that is written for Everyman. It is a book that one can imagine being dipped into here and there for a long time as The Body demands the reader return to it for more.
[Bryson] keeps the science lively by interweaving facts and statistics with anecdotes, interviews with scientists and doctors, and his trademark dry humor ... Bryson has shaped an enormous amount of anatomy and physiology into an informative and entertaining biostory. Recommended for Bryson fans and nonspecialists interested in human health and biology.
Mysterious and miraculous, the human body is more than a masterfully engineered biological machine. And Bryson serves as a delightful tour guide to nearly every component, protuberance, and crevice of it ... Bryson’s splendid stroll through human anatomy, physiology, evolution, and illness (diabetes, cancer, infections) is instructive, accessible, and entertaining.
Each relatively short chapter is chock-full of clear, in-depth explanations of the body and its components, focusing just the right amount of facts and attention on each area to keep the reader riveted and eager to dive into the next topic ... As with his previous writings, Bryson demonstrates his gift for putting science in layman’s terms, deftly melding the most incredible statistics with wit to expose humorous and fascinating aspects of the human condition ... He creatively intertwines amazing medical advances, such as transplant surgery and antibiotics, with topics that are still very much unknown, such as the immune system and allergies. It’s rather humbling to realize that there’s so much we don’t know about the place that houses all of our thoughts, feelings and physical attributes. As Bryson so effectively conveys in The Body, we truly are a work in progress.
Through anecdotes about scientific history and startling facts that seem too extraordinary to be true—the DNA in one person, if stretched out, would measure billions of miles and reach beyond Pluto—Bryson draws the reader into his subject ... Bryson’s tone is both informative and inviting, encouraging the reader, throughout this exemplary work, to share the sense of wonder he expresses at how the body is constituted and what it is capable of.
