Review: ‘The Body’ by Bill Bryson

 by Hamish Orr

Bill Bryson's most recent best selling book, ‘The Body, a guide for occupants’  takes the complicated  inner workings of a human being and presents it in a humorous and fascinating way that can catch the interest of the reader with endless facts entwined with jokes and thought provoking analogies. 

‘Your lungs smoothed out would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch from London to Moscow. The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around the world. The most remarkable part of all is your DNA. You have 10 meters of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all of the DNA into your body into one single fine strand it would stretch 10 billion miles, to beyond Pluto. The cartilage in your joints is smoother than glass, and has a friction coefficient five times less than ice. We are made of seven billion billion billion atoms, the constituent elements of which would cost £96,546.79 in the open market.’ - Bill Bryson

Bryson begins the book with a broad overview, explaining how we humans are made up and organised in one coherent living being and what makes you, you. The first chapter, ‘How to build a Human’ provides a gripping start to what is a great book. Through the book, every aspect of human physiology and pathology is explored. From skin and hair, whose dead cells leave a trail of dust weighing as much as 0.5 Kg a year, to the heart and blood, guts, brain and lungs to name a few. 

Towards the end of the book Bryson talks of how our complex organisms go wrong and how we rest. Exploring the mysteries around sleep and why we don’t entirely understand the benefit to our body, other than without it we die. Through the later chapters, Bryson discusses disease, cancer and death, expressing how medicine can only go so far and demonstrates the impact of lifestyle on life expectancy with wealthy Americans living shorter lives than people less fortunate around the world and that Cuba and Lithuania have lower infant mortality rates than America.

‘The Body’ is a great addition to Bryson's collection of books and a great addition to his other great science book - A Short History of Nearly Everything. Overall this book is well worth reading and might just change your perspective on the one thing we take for granted every day, our existence.