The Body: A Guide for Occupants - THE SUNDAY TIMES NO.1 BESTSELLER

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I had particular concerns about his discussions of sex and sex chromosomes, which was so simplified and bad that it pretty much went directly to a TERF place. (The problems start with him saying everyone has two sex chromosomes, and that if you have XX you are always female and if you have XY you are always male, and then they sort of go on from there. Biology is more complicated than your fifth-grade-level overview suggests.) He also manages a neatly internally contradictory discussion of the Death Fat that spans over multiple chapters. (Especially enjoyed him explaining in one chapter some of the reasons humans are fatter today than previously, only to explain in another chapter that we all just eat too much and don’t exercise enough. Also there’s a good bit where he explains that fat is definitely killing everyone early, only to point out a bit later that some of the fattest populations on the planet are also the longest-lived. And so on.) There’s also a fun spot where he describes Alexis St. Martin, who was an intensively mistreated victim of constant unethical experimentation by a physician, as “not the most cooperative of subjects.” There’s a lot of stuff like that, that Bryson lightly glosses over and really, really should not. 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.” 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. If you don't have that kind of money lying about, you can also do it the old-fashioned way that involves heterosexual sex. I'm not here to judge your methods; make a human whichever way you please. What I am here to do is tell you that Bill Bryson has done it again! He has written yet another brilliant and vastly interesting book, this time about the human body. Whether you want to know about bones or skin or digestion, muscles or brains or bacteria, you'll find it in this book. I don't even know where to begin in telling you about the contents. Whilst some things I already knew and thus this was a refresher, there were even more that I didn't know and thus made my brain very happy. There are just so many interesting facts wrapped up in this book. A random few from my highlights: Do I recommend reading this? Absolutely. Everyone ought to have a primer on themselves. The benefit here is much more than meets the eye, though. So many new discoveries and outright debunking of myths have made it in this text. Recent ones, too.

The 18th & 19th centuries were very bad....medicine sank into a kind of dark age. You could hardly imagine more misguided and counterproductive practices than those to which physicians became attached in the eighteenth century, and even much of the nineteenth. All the richness of life is created inside your head. What you see is not what is but what your brain tells you it is, and that's not the same thing at all.

Funk didn't discover vitamins but merely speculated, correctly, as to their existence. But since no one could produce these strange elements, many authorities refused to accept their reality. Sir James Barr, president of the British Medical Association, dismissed them as ‘a figment of the imagination’ A lot of myths I grew up with are not true. Like the fact we only use ten percent of our brain--false. I was taught as a kid that different parts of the tongue were attuned to different tastes like salty, sweet, sour. Nope. Also, like the movie the Matrix, apparently when I eat a brownie straight from the oven, it doesn’t actually taste good, my brain just reads these scentless, flavorless molecules and makes me think they’re pleasurable. 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.

Skin gets its color from a variety of pigments, the best known is a molecule we know as melanin. It’s also responsible for the color of birds’ feathers and gives fish the texture and luminescence of the their scales. Our skin evolved based on our geography. We spend our whole lives in one body and yet most of us have practically no idea how it works and what goes on inside it. The idea of the book is simply to try to understand the extraordinary contraption that is us.' don't smoke or do drugs and drink alcohol moderately As with so much in life, getting the balances right is delicate business. This book does for biology what books like Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong or A People's History of the United States have done for history; it updates and corrects some common misconceptions that may have been passed on to us at one stage or another.The book is full of other fascinating facts as well. Many of us know, for example, that damages to our frontal lobes result in personality changes, which was the reason lobotomy became popular at one point in human history (Rosemary Kennedy was lobotomized because her father considered her too willful, something Bryson mentions in this book, too). 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.) No matter what the subject, Bryson’s style is consistent: snappy prose, engaging anecdotes, and fun facts, all tied together with a lot of curiosity and humor. At its worst, this can make for some superficial books—a meandering array of factoids with little structure—which in my experience plagues his history writing. But science seems to bring out the best in Bryson. Here, the writing is disciplined and controlled. He clearly did a great deal of research and organized his facts with care. And Bryson has a rare talent for research. You would think that, in our media-saturated age, most of the great stories and characters from history would be known. But somehow Bryson is always able to uncover an unsung hero with an eccentric personality. The history of science seems particularly rich in this. 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. Fossil evidence suggests that early hominins were walking by about six million years ago, but needed an additional four million years to acquire the capabilities for endurance running and, with it, persistence hunting.