the_body_a_guide_for_occupants

Bill “Ms. Frizzle” Bryson takes us on a breezy adventure through the human body in his 2019 The Human: A Guide For Occupants. This ~400 page book is separated into sections like “the guts” and “the skeleton” and so on. Not much of the information itself was new to me, but the chapters were stuffed with history and stories ranging from funny to absolutely harrowing. At many points in this read I felt myself physically cringing and twisting. There is no easy way to read a story about a guy getting a tennis ball sized gallstone extracted from his sliced open taint with a pair of tongs with little to no anesthesia administered. At least we have Bill’s casual and generally light-hearted tone delivering these grotesque stories.

It is worth emphasizing that point: the subjects broached are far more palatable in Bill Bryson’s voice. It is a bummer, to put it mildly, to read about cancer and dying and failed medical experiments in years past. Bill could just joke it all away, but he instead strikes the perfect balance of telling us like it is while still being our commiserating pal: he is like a good doctor, perhaps. He doesn’t shy away from telling us basically like the worst shit you could ever hear and reminding us that we are going to die and there are so many ways it can go down. Following up with an “I know, right?”, does sort of lift a bit of the doom.

There is a lot of “nobody knows quite why”’s in this book. It simultaneously reminds us about the inexplicable mystery of our life in this body and the sheer terror of having such little control over what will happen. Modern medicine is so advanced, yet…. nobody knows why… Lovely.

This is one of the most crushable biology book out there - it is not an exaggeration to say this is a beach read. It’s engaging, fun, and every other paragraph I was completely fascinated by a factoid or story. I had to stop myself halfway through telling my girlfriend the story about doctors exploding a guy by putting some electrified bar up his butt and it combusting with the methane in his farts. It was clear by that point I had already regaled her with one too many of those anecdotes.