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

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Many myths about the body are shown and design flaws described, but after billion years of evolution, that´s no wonder. We deliberately build in design flaws in everything we create and call it planned obsolescence and what is an appendix or other useless extra bonus parts compared to that. From up to down, inside to outside, young to old, organ to nerve and so on goes the journey trough our miraculous wonder of nature whose amazing eyes are just sending this information to the brain of the reader. Bryson knows he isn't writing a book for medical professionals here. There's a certain amount of depth in some chapters, but it feels like a lot is probably skimmed over so us laymen can wrap our heads around the information. And, frankly, it wouldn't be nearly as readable if that wasn't the case. It is a feat of narrative skill to bake so many facts into an entertaining and nutritious book.' Daily Telegraph I've read a few Brysons before... and my favorite has got to be A Short History of Nearly Everything. This one, from a regular knowledge-gathering stand, comes in as a tight second. The travelogues are fun and often funny, but Short History is pretty comprehensive and rather more funny. This one, however, was not very funny at all.

I am joining a book club; unusual for me because I am not a hugely social animal. It is based at the university where I work for one day a week and it meets a lunch time, once every two months. This is the book for January; it’s not something I would have read in normal circumstances. Did you also know that it's 400 times more likely that a teenager is in an accident if said teenager is accompanied by another teenager?! And this isn't just limited to car accidents. 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. 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.

With these two things in mind, proceed at your own risk! If you love trivia and don’t mind dumbed down science, this should be perfect for you. If you are a doctor, it may be too simple of an explanation to satisfy – or, maybe not??? If you are easily queasy when it comes to blood, vomit, and other bodily fluids and functions, I would suggest passing on this one.

We thus hear of the abominable Typhoid Mary, a women who, at one point, found out she was one of the rare carriers of typhoid without showing any symptoms, but decided to still work in kitchens (against a promise she had made to the authorities) and didn't even bother to wash her hands before preparing meals, thus spreading the disease until she was finally put under house arrest. 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). If the book has any takeaway, it is that lifestyle is important. Exercises is tremendously beneficial; and inactivity is likewise lethal. A good diet makes a big difference, too, as does avoiding obviously harmful activities like smoking and excessive drinking. Our bad habits in the United States are partially why we lag behind other developed nations in life expectancy. As Bryson also points out, our health system is not particularly good, either, despite the enormous costs involved (several times the prices in other countries). Indeed, the American health system is not only lagging behind other countries, but is actively creating problems. The most obvious example of this is the opioid epidemic, which is largely caused by overprescribing pain medication. And the reason that these medications are only overprescribed in America, it seems, is the unsavory relationship between doctors and drug companies. 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’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.)

Or did you know that we always say "our 5 senses" but that there are many more? Like the sense that tells us if we're lying down or standing upright even when our eyes are closed? It's called proprioception (our sense of where we are in relation to the space around us). 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. 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. When the book’s not enraging, it’s just dull. Bryson mostly elides his own narrative voice, which is his main strength as a writer, in favor of pretending to be an authority, so we get an endless dull recitation of facts that many readers already know. (And many of which we learned from more engaging books than this one.)

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.” Smell is said to account for at least 70 per cent of flavour and maybe even as much as 90 per cent. To know that one does not know how not just even a tiny part of the body works is the first step to getting interested in exploring each fascinating, inner landscape. 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. According to one study, the number of bacteria on you actually rises after a bath or shower because they are flushed out from nooks and crannies.