Skip to main content

The Body - Bill Bryson ****

I am a huge fan of Bill Bryson's travel books - he is a superb storyteller, and in the best parts of his science writing, this ability to provide fascinating facts and intriguing tales shines through.

 After taking on the whole of science in his first book, here he focuses in on the physiology, anatomy and diseases of the human body. Bryson does so with his usual light, approachable style, peppering the plethora of facts (and 'don't know's - it's amazing how much we still don't know about the workings of the body) with the little nuggets you can't help but share and stories of some of the odd and, frankly, horrifying goings on in the history of medicine.

 So, for example, Bryson throws in 'The chin is unique to humans and no one knows why we have one.' He speculates that it might be just that we 'find a good chin dashing' and quotes a Harvard professor as saying 'Testing this last hypothesis is especially difficult, but the reader is encouraged to think of appropriate experiments.'

 It's a long time since I read Bryson's first science book, but I suspect that his Short History of Nearly Everything involved more going and talking to scientists, so had more of the feel of a documentary, and more opportunity to bring in his travel writing skills. Here, there was more of a focus on presentation of facts, though always in a way that felt more like a conversation with a friend than an introductory textbook on human biology - and there are still a number of interviews.

 A good example of the way Bryson goes about exploring a topic is the way he deals with asthma. He starts with a story about the writer Marcel Proust, describing the many ways that Proust attempted to treat the condition, including enemas, opium and  having the gas to his house cut off. From Proust we move on to the way asthma has become more prevalent and the remarkable variation around the world - not, as you might expect, paralleling the degree of air pollution. It was shocking to read that the highest rate in the world is in the UK, where '30 per cent of children have shown asthma symptoms in the last year.' This is compared with rates around 3 percent in China, Greece, Romania and Russia. He then goes on, using an interview with an expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to show how most of our ideas about asthma are wrong. For example, he quotes Neil Pearce as saying 'the main thing I have achieved is to show that almost none of the things people think cause asthma actually do.'

 Along the way Bryson takes us on a tour of the body, starting with 'the outside' (skin and hair) and working through all the main parts, the vast numbers of microbes that share our body, body functions - such as movement, eating and sleep - and diseases, finishing with a whole chapter on cancer and another on the way that medicine has developed from doing more harm than good to its present state.

 This is the perfect book for anyone (like me) who had little to do with biology at school and to whom much of the functioning of human anatomy is a mystery. You know that with Bryson at the helm, the voyage through your inner workings is bound to be fascinating and entertaining. I wish there had been more opportunity for his humour and recounting personal adventures, as in his travel books, because this is where Bryson is at his best - but even when recounting facts he keeps the reader interested, never lingering long enough to get bogged down.

 Well worth a look.
Hardback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more