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

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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. In one of the studies he talks about, a man was given an injection of a harmless liquid to mimic snot. It couldn’t be seen by the naked eye, but under those blue lights detectives use. The test subject went into a room with other folks, and when they turned the overhead lights off and the blue lights on, every single person, doorknob, and bowl of nuts had the pretend snot on it, which is how the common cold passes from person to person so easily—through touch, apparently not by making out with someone (although presumably at some point you might touch that person). Fruit growers use antibiotics to combat bacterial infections in their crops, sometimes even of produce marked “organic.” This means we humans are unwittingly eating antibiotics, rendering them ineffective when we need them for a real disease/infection. Equally bewildering is that autoimmune diseases are grossly sexist..... Altogether, 80 per cent of all autoimmune diseases occur in women. Hormones are the presumed culprit but how exactly female hormones trip up the immune system when male hormones don't is not at all clear.

The paradox of genetics is that we are all very different and yet genetically practically identical. All humans share 99.9 percent of their DNA. Because we don´t understand, we should treat the body as good as possible with a diet of things and thoughts of which we know that they are not harmful Or did you know how many things we still cannot explain? One such thing are emotional responses like crying when sad - it has no physiological benefit AND is the same response as for joy so why are we doing it? Our bodies are a universe of 37.2 trillion cells operating in more or less perfect concert more or less all of the time. ... The miracle of human life is not that we are endowed with some frailties but we are not swamped by them. ...Bryson takes us on anatomical tour of the body, system by system, dropping sexy names like Pacinian corpuscles and Islets of Langerhans along the way while also giving a bit of history of medicine and medical discoveries (Typhoid Mary and discovery of antibiotics and insulin are a must, and my sheer horror at finally learning why “lithotomy” position which I’ve blissfully said countless times is actually called that, and not to forget Phineas Gage and his frontal lobe injury and the absolute horror of lobotomies and the sheer idiocy of bleeding people to cure all ailments 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️) and ultimately arrives at dangers of over-caloried sedentary lifestyle unsuited for the bodies evolved for hunter-gatherer needs, overtreated for often little to no benefit. I went into this book with the attitude of "of course, Bill Bryson can make anything interesting", but I was still a little unsure if this was the right book for me. There are definitely interesting aspects of the body, but I'm more of a "fun fact here, quirky tidbit there" kinda person. I wasn't sure I wanted to read a whole book full of words I can't pronounce. But, no, Bill Bryson really can make anything interesting. While reading, I imagined Alton Brown reading the text in the same manner he talks to the audience in Good Eats. Bill Nye would be a great narrator, too! And with this elegant turn of sentiment, Bryson embarked on a journey of the human body, from top to bottom and from outside in. Despite its subtitle and seeming breadth, it appeared to me to offer limited value as a user's personal handbook. The bulk of The Body instead was evenly divided between being an idiosyncratic assortment of medical characters and scientists and a brief introductory course to anatomy and physiology. 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.'

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 Every gram of feces you produce contains 40 billion bacteria and 100 million archaea." (Now that's something you can impress your co-workers with at your Christmas party!) 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. But as the title suggests, outright occupancy usually comes with a rental charge. The bill always comes due. It is a feat of narrative skill to bake so many facts into an entertaining and nutritious book.' Daily Telegraph

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Bryson decided to explain anatomy to the reader as well as giving historical and practical context. For many, the stammering miraculously ceases when they sing their words, speak in a foreign language or talk to themselves. The majority of speakers recover from the condition by their teenage years and females seem to recover more easily than men . 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: Most other mammals never suffer strokes, and for those that do it is a rare event. But for humans, it is the second most common cause of death globally, according to the World Health Organization. Why this should be is something of a mystery. You come away from this thinking that a lot of people are basically bastards. I won’t spoil the stories, but the person who took credit for Streptomycin fits this category particularly nicely.

Many tests have been done to demonstrate how easily we are fooled with respect to flavour. In a blind taste test at the University of Bordeaux students in the Faculty of Oenology were given two glasses of wine, one red and one white. The wines were actually identical except that one had been made a rich red with an odourless and flavourless additive. The students without exception listed entirely different qualities for the two wines. That wasn't because they were inexperienced or naive. It was because their sight led them to have entirely different expectations, and this powerfully influenced what they sensed when they took a sip from either glass. In exactly the same way, if an orange-flavoured drink is coloured red, you cannot help but taste it as cherry. So couple that with the following, and the profound insight explains why race is purely a social construct.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants has you covered! For those of us who haven't had a biology class since we fulfilled some course requirement ages ago, Bryson gives an excellent overview of what doctors and scientists know about all our different body parts and bodily functions. We shed over a million flakes of skin every hour, leaving behind about a pound of dust every year. (Easy way to rid yourself of a pound, but for some reason I've never seen it in a diet book.) A study in Switzerland found that flu virus can survive on a banknote for two and a half weeks if it is accompanied by a microdot of snot.” Stuttering affects 1 per cent of adults and 4 per cent of children. For reasons unknown, 80 per cent of sufferers are male. It is more common among left-handers than right-handers, especially those who have been made to write right-handed. Unlike the rest of the body, the palms don't sweat in response to physical exertion or heat, but only from stress. Emotional sweating is what is measured in lie-detector tests.