The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Bill Bryson is one of my favourite technical authors out there. When I found there is a new book, I wasted no time.
Here’s my review on The Body - A Guide for Occupants
This is yet another of my favorites from Bill Bryson. If you haven’t read his earlier work “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, you should. I place it at par with Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens though I am comparing apples and oranges here. Combing back to The Body: A guide for occupants, it is a combination of extensive research and superlative storytelling so that even laymen can understand the subject. And this is pure bliss to read.
Each chapter begins with the structural properties of the organs and then moves on to how it functions. All the while mentioning funny/serious anecdotes and the amount of research and difficulties in bringing the state of medicine to its current form. He then moves on to mention why a specific part works that way. (most common reason being unknown). You wonder at the number of unknowns present in our body and how the field of medicine tackled historically.
At the end of the book, he explains diseases and their effects on our bodies. One of the statements that struck me very odd:
“For the first time, more people globally died from non-communicable diseases like heart failure, stroke and diabetes than from all infectious diseases combined. We live in an age which we are killed, more often than not, by lifestyle”.
This makes us wonder how far we have come from being hunter-gathers to couch potatoes and call that as progress wrt lifestyle.
If this book doesn’t make you thankful for your body, if it doesn’t push you to take more care of it, then perhaps nothing will.
A Must read.
Originally posted on GoodReads