If you’ve read Bryson before you’ll be familiar with his enthusiastic and often humorous tone as he dashes from interesting fact to fascinating snippet via a potted biography of this key figure and a short history of that key topic. Certainly he’s not advocating any kind of political action from his readers, more disseminating an awareness of inequalities that might surprise you.) (It’s clear Bryson is not impressed by American healthcare – or many aspects of the British system – though his ire doesn’t stretch much further than appalled comparisons. What’s it like?įrequently fascinating, often humorous and occasionally judgmental. Specifically: your skin, hair, microbes, brain, head, mouth, throat, heart, blood, chemistry, skeleton, bipedalism, exercise, equilibrium, immune system, breathing, digestion, sleeping, private parts, conception, birth, pain, diseases, medicine and, of course, your death.

This is definitely a book for those people who found biology interesting but didn’t turn it into their day job. Now, if none of the above is news to you (or at least feels reasonably new as in “ah, now that I read this I vaguely recall learning about it during my school days but failing to retain it because it’s so bizarre / hard to fathom / mind bending”) then you probably aren’t the right audience for Bryson’s whistle stop tour of the human body. I love this last fact, because it explains why I always really struggle to judge whether cold laundry is dry or not my brain literally cannot tell the difference (which is why I often bypass my senses entirely by allocating a certain number of hours drying time, then assuming that even the coldest feeling clothes are long since dry).

Or, more accurately, reality is not ‘real’ but the constant creation of our ever-busy brains, which are significantly more powerful than any man-made computer, constantly interpreting the world around us to create the perception of a rich sensory environment.ĭid you know that objects don’t actually have an inherent smell or taste or colour, which is why soap lather is always white, no matter what colour your bar of soap appears to be? Or that we don’t have any bodily receptors for wetness, meaning that when you sit down on a wet spot you can’t tell if it is wet or just cold? So it turns out Neo was right we are living in a matrix.

Bill bryson the body review