Bill Bryson’s new book, “The Body: A Guide For Occupants,” provides important (and funny) lessons in anatomy, neuroscience, physiology, biology, and more.
English anatomist John Banester (1533 – 1610) delivers the Visceral Lecture at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall in London, 1581.
- American-British scholar, Bill Bryson, has written a fascinating user’s guide to the human body.
- The Body: A Guide For Occupants provides important lessons in anatomy, neuroscience, physiology, biology, and more.
- Though we’ve learned a lot about ourselves in the last two centuries, it’s still clear there’s much we don’t know.
As far as medicine and science have come, we remain ignorant of much of how our body functions. It’s a challenge for us, for instance, to wrap our heads around the ecosystems that live within us — that are us. Indeed, even for the self-aware animal that we are, we’re still in a nascent phase of understanding what we really are.
That’s why we need writers like Bill Bryson. His new book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, continues the American-British scholar’s quest to understand nearly everything — as evidenced by his 2004 book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. Most well-known for travel books such as A Walk in the Woods and Notes From a Small Island, Bryson’s nonfiction writing is as enjoyable as his journals galavanting around the globe — not nearly as humorous, but he lets plenty of quips slip into this latest work as well.
Below are 10 factoids about yourself (and, more generally, our species) that you might not have known. If only this book had been available during my high school years, I might have retained more than I did with those dry biology textbooks. Educators, take note.
To hear Bryson explore his new work, make sure to check out a recent episode of our podcast, Think Again.
Bill Bryson, travel writer, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 10, 2015 in Cheltenham, England. Photo credit: David Levenson / Getty Images