5 THINGS ABOUT THE HUMAN BODY.
The one thing that struck Bill Bryson while working on his new book was how lucky we are to have a body. “To be a human being is a real gift. And most of us don’t look after that gift anything like well enough,” Bryson said over the phone recently from his hotel room in Toronto, where he was promoting The Body: A Guide for Occupants.
People everywhere are getting fatter, only about one in five of us manages even a modest amount of exercise and “almost every person on Earth in advanced nations eats more than they ought to,” Bryson said. Lately, for Bryson, it’s been too many club sandwiches and fries.
He estimates he’s gained at least 10 or 12 pounds since his book tour launched in August (“you eat what you can when you can.”) He’s taking next year off, to sort himself out.
The best-selling travel writer and author of A Short History of Nearly Everything this time takes readers on a tour of our wondrous “warm wobble of flesh" — how complex the body is, and how much is packed into it.
Standing over a cadaver in a dissecting room, the American-British writer marvels at the liver, pancreas and kidneys, as well as the intestines — “lots and lots of intestines, all of it just kind of tipped in, as if this poor, anonymous former person had had to pack himself in a hurry.”
Along the way Bryson unearths a dizzying number of oddities — we don’t know why we yawn or suffer chronic pain, our lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, we choke to death more easily than any other mammal but could eat hanging upside down if we so chose (food drops into the stomach via muscular contractions, and not gravity) and human females are the only land-based animals, other than sheep, that go through menopause. Below, five more of our favourite things.