We are darn well amazing. We've all heard that rather gooey truth "We are all made of stardust..." but read this book, and you will learn even more extraordinary truths. We are phenomenal creatures. If you aren't filled with a fantastic sense of wonder whilst reading this then pinch yourself hard, because something is missing.

One caveat, particularly for Goodreads reviewers--more than our fair share of us have had frustrating or scary "adventures" through the medical system. Since Bryson spends a surprising amount of time discussing the things doctors *don't* know, this aspect of the text could be unsettling.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. The ideal gift for readers of every age who wish to discover more about themselves. Many tests have been done to demonstrate how easily we are fooled with respect to flavour. In a blind taste test at the University of Bordeaux students in the Faculty of Oenology were given two glasses of wine, one red and one white. The wines were actually identical except that one had been made a rich red with an odourless and flavourless additive. The students without exception listed entirely different qualities for the two wines. That wasn't because they were inexperienced or naive. It was because their sight led them to have entirely different expectations, and this powerfully influenced what they sensed when they took a sip from either glass. In exactly the same way, if an orange-flavoured drink is coloured red, you cannot help but taste it as cherry. Like all of Bryson´s books, it an entertaining and great read, integrating history, medical science and vivid examples that stay in mind and easily find a way to a long term memory whose functioning we don´t understand to associate it with a brain we know nothing about and a mind that,... well, you get the meaning. I didn't realise that the X-chromosome was called that because the person who discovered it didn’t know what it did – and so, like ‘planet X’, the letter was chosen due to this mystery rather than for the chromosome’s shape. And the Y-chromosome was likewise named following on from X in the alphabet.

Bryson not only unearths unsung heroes, but surprising information. Bryson is a fun fact factory. Arguably, fun facts are the very definition of superficial knowledge; but Bryson’s curiosities are irresistible. There were so many things about the body—about digestion, sleep cycles, anatomy, disease—that I did not know, and so many things that surprised me. For example, I learned that our eyes do not only have rods and cones, but photoreceptive ganglion cells; these do not contribute to vision in any way, but tell us when it is light or dark. This is why some blind people instinctually know if it is day or night, or even if the light is on or off. My one big takeaway from The Body is that we know almost nothing about the body. We know so much more than we did a hundred years ago, and yet we still know almost nothing. I swear that about ten times in every chapter, there's a comment like "these cells do this, but nobody knows why" or "women are 10x more likely to get this disease than men, but why is anybody's guess". I mean, we spend a third of our lives asleep and no one even knows why we do that. I had particular concerns about his discussions of sex and sex chromosomes, which was so simplified and bad that it pretty much went directly to a TERF place. (The problems start with him saying everyone has two sex chromosomes, and that if you have XX you are always female and if you have XY you are always male, and then they sort of go on from there. Biology is more complicated than your fifth-grade-level overview suggests.) He also manages a neatly internally contradictory discussion of the Death Fat that spans over multiple chapters. (Especially enjoyed him explaining in one chapter some of the reasons humans are fatter today than previously, only to explain in another chapter that we all just eat too much and don’t exercise enough. Also there’s a good bit where he explains that fat is definitely killing everyone early, only to point out a bit later that some of the fattest populations on the planet are also the longest-lived. And so on.) There’s also a fun spot where he describes Alexis St. Martin, who was an intensively mistreated victim of constant unethical experimentation by a physician, as “not the most cooperative of subjects.” There’s a lot of stuff like that, that Bryson lightly glosses over and really, really should not.Bryson delights in our physical oddities, and his sense of wonder is infectious. How fantastic that there is such a thing as the Belly Button Biodiversity Project (run by North Carolina State University) that has discovered 1,458 species in bacteria new to science in people’s navels! How astounding that a man hiccupped for 67 years straight! As you’ve likely gathered from his other work, he loves a good statistic, and while this book is full of numbers and percentages, they are accessible rather than obfuscating, and will make you shake your head in amazement. Did you also know that it's 400 times more likely that a teenager is in an accident if said teenager is accompanied by another teenager?! And this isn't just limited to car accidents. Bill Bryson sets off to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts, astonishing stories and now fully illustrated for the first time, The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological make up. It´s better and more informative than biology education and in my imagination I see books like this in a close future with much more data, pictures, animations, links of different grade of difficulty for each kind of reader, VR, AR and the integration of the reading audience, probably with a kinda collective reading live streams while using different kinds of technologies or just old school reading.