The Body by Bill Bryson

The Blurb:

THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER _______

'A directory of wonders.' – The Guardian 'Jaw-dropping.' – The Times 'Classic, wry, gleeful Bryson…an entertaining and absolutely fact-rammed book.' – The Sunday Times

'It is a feat of narrative skill to bake so many facts into an entertaining and nutritious book.' – The Daily Telegraph _______ ‘We spend our whole lives in one body and yet most of us have practically no idea how it works and what goes on inside it. The idea of the book is simply to try to understand the extraordinary contraption that is us.’

Bill Bryson sets off to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts and astonishing stories The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological make up.

A wonderful successor to A Short History of Nearly Everything, this new book is an instant classic. It will have you marvelling at the form you occupy, and celebrating the genius of your existence, time and time again.

‘What I learned is that we are infinitely more complex and wondrous, and often more mysterious, than I had ever suspected. There really is no story more amazing than the story of us.’ Bill Bryson.

About Bill Bryson:

Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. Settled in England for many years, he moved to America with his wife and four children for a few years ,but has since returned to live in the UK. His bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Notes From a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Down Under. His acclaimed work of popular science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize, and was the biggest selling non-fiction book of the decade in the UK.

My Review:

I have, in my past studied anatomy and physiology, but oh boy do I wish I had this book was around in those days. I would have turned to it to make more sense of some of the heavy text books I had to plough through. Bill Bryson takes the reader on a journey through the human body written in the style of a good travel book, complete with historical and scientific facts and factoids to make this topic more interesting, and more likely to be remembered. There's a lot to be said for learning through entertainment, and that is the true value of this book.