The Body: A Guide for Occupants
(Doubleday, $30)
“We humans are ad-hoc creatures, a jumble of work-arounds and jury-rigging,” said John Ross in The Wall Street Journal. We are also so endlessly fascinated with ourselves that several authors have recently written books attempting to thoroughly explain the workings of the human body. Nobody, though, has done it quite as well as Bill Bryson, who “writes better, is more amusing, and has greater mastery of his material than anyone else.” The body’s design, he reminds us, is part miracle, part mistake. Our bones are stronger than reinforced concrete yet light enough to allow us to sprint. But we are unable, unlike many other life-forms, to produce our own Vitamin C, and our long, vertical windpipes make us prone to choking. Bryson reflects us whole, and he’s “brisk, provocative, and entertaining throughout.”
“In some cases, that biological ingenuity and chaos are two sides of the same coin,” said Alexander Kafka in The Washington Post. We develop cancer because we couldn’t evolve as a species if our cells didn’t mutate—though, happily, the one to five cells that turn cancerous in the body every day are almost all caught and killed by our immune system. Other examples of “the brilliance and vast weirdness” within us: The body’s taste receptors sit not just in the tongue but also in the heart, lungs, and testicles. Despite such diversions, this book falls short of the author’s previous works,