The Body: A Guide for Occupants

Be prepared to marvel at the miracles of the human body. This book will amaze and humble you. Its subtitle, A Guide for Occupants, sums up the book’s accessibility. The content is understandable and well-crafted. The chapters are short explorations into bodily functions and anatomy, supported by historical backdrops. I’m aware of Bill Bryson’s penchant to explain the world’s phenomena: See, A Short History of Nearly Everything. This book, The Body, is also a short history of the brilliant workings of our bodily machinery: its systems, functions, diseases, symptoms, and of course, the big sleep. Each chapter is a mini-course in biology, contextualized by key events in history (i.e. discoveries, surgeries, therapies). You’d marinate in this book over time versus absorbing it one sitting. There are too many disparate facts to internalize all at once. You’d “escape into” this book when you’re desirous of the knowledge and insights that should reawaken your curiosity of life as we know it. Life can be either blissful or miserable depending on your health. For those who hit the health lottery, life is blissful and energizing. For those who drew the wrong numbers, it can be a grisly nightmare of unrelenting pain. The chapters on pain, disease, and death should rekindle serious gratitude. For example, “every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them.” This book is for anybody interested in the human body. I gifted this book to a doctor last year. It could be an entertaining refresher because it is expressed a thriller—not the typical medical treatise. I have read the hard copy and have listened to it on audible. The audible narrator aligns perfectly with the tone of the book. 15 Interesting facts in the book: 1. 40% of adult Americans—about 100 million—experience chronic pain at any given time. It affects more people than cancer, heart disease, and diabetes combined. 2. Pain is mysterious, and we’re not effective at curing it. 3. Disease outbreaks pop up, disappear, and may then reappear. 4. The medical profession has produced absolute heroes who invented solutions (i.e. vaccines & therapies) that mitigate a staggering amount of suffering. 5. The United States has 4% of the world’s population but consumes 80% of its opiates. 6. There are about 7,000 rare diseases. (1 in 17 people have rare diseases—which does not seem “rare.”). 7. Our “lifestyle diseases” a/k/a “mismatch diseases” (i.e. heart disease or diabetes caused by indolent or overindulgent lifestyles) have surpassed diseases of infection or genetics. 8. Medicine has gotten so good at treating the symptoms of lifestyle diseases that we’ve perpetuated their underlying causes. 9. Antibiotic effectiveness will soon be muted by new strains of bacteria. 10. 40% of us will discover that we have cancer at some point in our lives. Many, many more of us will have it but die of something else first. 11. Half of men over 60, and three-quarters of men over 70 will have prostate cancer at death and not even know it. It has been suggested that all men would have prostate cancer if they lived long enough. 12. Cancer cells do not provoke an inflammatory response, which is why they appear painless and invisible in their early stages. 13. Cancer is a “price” we pay for evolution. If cells did not mutate, we would not evolve. 14. Cancer is an “age thing.” For men, between birth and age 40, we have a 1 in 73 chance of getting it. After age 60, our odds skyrocket to 1 in 3 (yikes!). 15. Middle-aged Americans are twice as likely to die prematurely than those in Sweden, France, Germany, and the UK. Happy reading, my fellow knowledge seekers.

Its Bill Bryson and his talking about the body so of course everything in this book is interesting. Laid out in a witty style, the author distills complex functions in a very enjoyable manner. Did you know? -You blink fourteen thousand times a day—so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day. - Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast. - it constitutes 10 percent of all our genetic material. No one has any idea why. The mysterious part was for a while called junk DNA but now is more graciously called dark DNA, meaning that we don’t know what it does or why it is there. - Of the million or so microbes that have been identified, just 1,415 are known to cause disease in humans—very few, all things considered. - Surprisingly, the least effective way to spread germs (according to yet another study) is kissing. It proved almost wholly ineffective among volunteers at the University of Wisconsin who had been successfully infected with cold virus. Sneezes and coughs weren’t much better. The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch. It makes up just 2 percent of our body weight but uses 20 percent of our energy. In newborn infants, it’s no less than 65 percent. That’s partly why babies sleep all the time—their growing brains exhaust them—and have a lot of body fat, to use as an energy reserve when needed. - Smell is said to account for at least 70 percent of flavor, and maybe even as much as 90 percent. - In the United States, plasma sales make up 1.6 percent of all goods exported, more than America earns from the sale of airplanes. - it is a fact that men who have been castrated live about as long as women do. - You can remove two-thirds of a liver and it will grow back to - Above all, the adoption of a narrower pelvis to accommodate our new gait brought a huge amount of pain and danger to women in childbirth. Until recent times, no other animal on Earth was more likely to die in childbirth than a human, and perhaps none even now suffers as much. - Despite the vast differences in heart rates, nearly all animals have about 800 million heartbeats in them if they live an average life. The exception is humans. We pass 800 million heartbeats after twenty-five years, and just keep on going for another fifty years and 1.6 billion heartbeats or so. It is tempting to attribute this exceptional vigor to some innate superiority on our part, but in fact it is only over the last ten or twelve generations that we have deviated from the standard mammalian pattern thanks to improvements in our life expectancy. For most of our history, 800 million beats per lifetime was about the human average, too. - Allowing a fever to run its course (within limits, needless to say) could be the wisest thing. An increase of only a degree or so in body temperature has been shown to slow the replication rate of viruses by a factor of two hundred—an astonishing increase in self-defense from only a very modest rise in warmth. - Just look at how swiftly they swarm in and devour you when you die. That’s because your lifeless body falls to a delicious come-and-get-it temperature, like a pie left to cool on a windowsill. - In America, the daily recommended dose of vitamin E is fifteen milligrams, for instance, but in the U.K. it is three to four milligrams—a very considerable difference. - Heinz ketchup is almost one-quarter sugar. - According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, the amount of vegetables eaten by the average American between 2000 and 2010 dropped by thirty pounds. That seems an alarming decline until you realize that the most popular vegetable in America by a very wide margin is the French fry. (It accounts for a quarter of our entire vegetable intake.) These days, eating thirty pounds less “vegetables” may well be a sign of an improved diet. - A more scientific, and more recent, U.S. National Health and Social Life Survey found that 15 percent of married women and 25 percent of married men said they had been unfaithful at some time. - Over time, the mitochondrial pool for humans has shrunk so much that, almost unbelievably but rather wonderfully, we are all now descended from a single mitochondrial ancestor—a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. You might have heard her referred to as Mitochondrial Eve. She is, in a sense, mother of us all. - A twenty-week-old fetus will weigh no more than three or four ounces but will already have 6 million eggs inside her. - More than eighty thousand chemicals are produced commercially in the world today, and by one calculation 86 percent of them have never been tested for their effects on humans. We don’t even know much about the good or neutral chemicals around us. - Still, the story is mostly positive, and not just for childhood cancers but for cancers at all ages. In the developed world, death rates from lung, colon, prostate, Hodgkin’s disease, testicular cancer, and breast cancer have all fallen sharply—by between 25 and 90 percent—in twenty-five years or so. In the United States alone, 2.4 million fewer people have died of cancer in the last thirty years than would have if the rates had stayed unchanged. - By one reckoning, life expectancy on Earth improved by as much in the twentieth century as in the whole of the preceding eight thousand years. - By 1950, half of the medicines available for prescription had been invented or discovered in just the previous ten years. - A case in point is the drug atenolol, a beta-blocker designed to lower blood pressure, which has been widely prescribed since 1976. A study in 2004, involving a total of twenty-four thousand patients, found that atenolol did indeed reduce blood pressure but did not reduce heart attacks or fatalities compared with giving no treatment at all. People on atenolol expired at the same rate as everyone else, but, as one observer put it, “they just had better blood-pressure numbers when they died.” - By one calculation, if we found a cure for all cancers tomorrow, it would add just 3.2 years to overall life expectancy. - For every year of added life that has been achieved since 1990, only 10 months is healthy. Additionally there are interesting anecdotes and issues discussed such as: -On a Presidential visit to a farm, Mrs. Coolidge asked her guide how many times the rooster copulated daily. “Dozens of times” was the reply. “Please tell that to the President,” Mrs. Coolidge requested. When the President passed the pens and was told about the rooster, he asked: “Same hen every time?” “Oh no, Mr. President, a different one each time.” The President nodded slowly, then said: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.” —LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, JANUARY 25, 1990 I -The PSA test is “hardly more effective than a coin toss,” Professor Richard J. Ablin of the University of Arizona has written, and he should know. He was the man who discovered the prostate-specific antigen in 1970. Noting that American men spend at least $3 billion a year on prostate tests, he added, “I never dreamed that my discovery four decades ago would lead to such a profit-driven disaster.” And finally: Altogether, the human brain is estimated to hold something on the order of two hundred exabytes of information, roughly equal to “the entire digital content of today’s world,” according to Nature Neuroscience.*1 If that is not the most extraordinary thing in the universe, then we certainly have some wonders yet to find. You will need each exabyte to absorb this fascinating read.

Interesting and informative, but difficult to read due to the use of the proper name of the various parts of the body. Extremely long at over 400 pages of reading. For me there was a lot of repeated information, sometime this was needed but it caused me to wonder if I was just rereading the same pages over and over.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It is typically well written by Mr. Bryson, logical, well thought out, well researched, consistent and humorous. It's quite a tough, slow read, took me several weeks to finish because you really want to understand the subject information throughout and sometimes takes some re reading and backtracking to gain a full understanding. Bill Bryson has a wonderful way of writing, even tough subject matter like this. Even though he is American he has developed a very English sense of humor. Somehow he manages to make the mundane funny, the horrible interesting and facts become interesting facts. Great read with tons of educational information about our human bodies that is worth knowing!

Total fan of Bill Bryson. He’s done an excellent job writing this book. Not just a story but facts about our bodies. A must read.

Mr. Bryson does a great job, with a difficult subject that most people would otherwise find difficult if not boring to read. He has assembled a wide range of surprises concerning the human body and subjected these to his whimsical style that will keep the reader fascinated until the end. If you want to know more about how the body works and the advances (and limitations) of medical science, then I highly recommend this book.

Fascinating book. Have purchased it for gifts. Easy readable description of all the body systems.

Wonderfully written book with lot of facts.

The very good book to read and learn about the body and how it works. Highly recommended ♥️ Good book for the people who loves reading science field books. 📚

This is probably going to be my shortest book review ever! This book is simply a collection of facts, largely fun facts, about different parts of the body — the skin, hair, brain, head, the mouth, and so on. Bryson has achieved two remarkable things: (1) he has created a 400-page encyclopedia of the human body, and (2) he has made this the most fun-to-read encyclopedia ever. Since there is nothing much to review really, here are my top 10 fun facts from the book. (1) The human body is essentially a collection of inert elements — the same as in a pile of dirt. (2) The Royal Society of Chemistry calculated that assembling actor Benedict Cumberbatch from his basic chemical components would cost £96,546.79. (3) Race is merely a sliver of epidermis about a millimeter thick. (4) If flattened out, our lungs would cover a tennis court; our blood vessels, if laid end to end, would wrap around Earth 2.5 times; and our DNA, if stretched out, would extend beyond Pluto. (5) We grow 8 meters of hair in our lifetime. (6) Visual inputs take one-fifth of a second to process, so the brain continuously forecasts what the world will look like a fifth of a second ahead — we spend our entire lives living in a world that doesn't quite exist yet. (7) Volume doubles approximately every 6 decibels, meaning a 96-decibel sound isn't just slightly louder than a 90-decibel sound — it's twice as loud. (8) Although everyone reads and pronounces the last blood group as the letter "O," Landsteiner (who discovered blood types) actually meant it to be zero, since this type showed no clumping reaction. (9) During a single day of breathing, you likely inhale at least one molecule that was once exhaled by every person who has ever lived. (10) While studying specimens, Henking noticed one chromosome that always remained separate from the others. He named it "X" simply because it was mysterious, not because of its shape. Pros: Lots of interesting facts about the human body, comprehensive yet concise Cons: It's just a collection of interesting facts about the human body!

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I think Bill Bryson’s science books should be mandatory reading at schools. They’re so entertainingly written and full of fun facts and historical anecdotes that if I wasn’t already a science nut, Bryson’s books would turn me into one. A Short History of Nearly Everything is easily the best book on Earth, life, and the universe that I’ve ever read, and The Body: A Guide for Occupants does the same for the human body. My favorite quote from the book: “The most remarkable part of all is your DNA. You have a metre of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single fine strand it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto. Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic.” Epic, don't you think? I would gladly recommend this book to anyone and everyone, and I myself am going to be reading it again.