I've read a few Brysons before... and my favorite has got to be A Short History of Nearly Everything. This one, from a regular knowledge-gathering stand, comes in as a tight second. The travelogues are fun and often funny, but Short History is pretty comprehensive and rather more funny. This one, however, was not very funny at all. Classic, wry, gleeful Bryson... richly interesting... an entertaining and absolutely fact-rammed book. If it sells hundreds of thousands of copies, like the last one, it will be no bad thing.' Sunday Times Even with the advantage of clothing, shelter and boundless ingenuity, humans can manage to live on only about 12 per cent of Earth’s land area” There is disagreement over what precisely we do need. In America, the daily recommended dose of vitamin E is 15 milligrams, but in the UK it is 3 to 4 milligrams – a very considerable difference. Most other mammals never suffer strokes, and for those that do it is a rare event. But for humans, it is the second most common cause of death globally, according to the World Health Organization. Why this should be is something of a mystery.

From up to down, inside to outside, young to old, organ to nerve and so on goes the journey trough our miraculous wonder of nature whose amazing eyes are just sending this information to the brain of the reader. The paradox of genetics is that we are all very different and yet genetically practically identical. All humans share 99.9 percent of their DNA.The 18th & 19th centuries were very bad....medicine sank into a kind of dark age. You could hardly imagine more misguided and counterproductive practices than those to which physicians became attached in the eighteenth century, and even much of the nineteenth. According to one study, the number of bacteria on you actually rises after a bath or shower because they are flushed out from nooks and crannies. As well as conveying a huge bundle of facts in a fascinating fashion, Bryson also makes his readers laugh. I love this guy's sense of humour. That eased off a bit towards the end as he started talking about the body in old age. I possess a 69-year-old body, and I quaked a bit when I learnt the degree to which us older folk are more prone to problems. I presumed that I knew that already, but to see it so clearly laid out in print is daunting. For instance "An eighty-year-old person is a thousand times more likely than a teenager to develop cancer." Whaaaaaat? Although he doesn't dwell overly on the negatives of being elderly, the book nevertheless brings home to you with a thump some of the downsides of ageing. Bryson decided to explain anatomy to the reader as well as giving historical and practical context. Later Add: Dr Abigail Zuger, who writes for The New York Times says that the book has several errors.

Tropes show how literature is conceived and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:Bryson takes us on anatomical tour of the body, system by system, dropping sexy names like Pacinian corpuscles and Islets of Langerhans along the way while also giving a bit of history of medicine and medical discoveries (Typhoid Mary and discovery of antibiotics and insulin are a must, and my sheer horror at finally learning why “lithotomy” position which I’ve blissfully said countless times is actually called that, and not to forget Phineas Gage and his frontal lobe injury and the absolute horror of lobotomies and the sheer idiocy of bleeding people to cure all ailments 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️) and ultimately arrives at dangers of over-caloried sedentary lifestyle unsuited for the bodies evolved for hunter-gatherer needs, overtreated for often little to no benefit. Skin gets its color from a variety of pigments, the best known is a molecule we know as melanin. It’s also responsible for the color of birds’ feathers and gives fish the texture and luminescence of the their scales. Our skin evolved based on our geography. Four stars for the print version--and if the audiobook is available when you're making your purchasing decision, I would definitely give this a listen. For many, the stammering miraculously ceases when they sing their words, speak in a foreign language or talk to themselves. The majority of speakers recover from the condition by their teenage years and females seem to recover more easily than men . Bryson knows he isn't writing a book for medical professionals here. There's a certain amount of depth in some chapters, but it feels like a lot is probably skimmed over so us laymen can wrap our heads around the information. And, frankly, it wouldn't be nearly as readable if that wasn't the case.

Bryson's dry wit will come across even more clearly when this is eventually made into an audiobook. The bottom line is that we ended up with brains big enough to handle complex thoughts and vocal tracts uniquely able to articulate them." Fruit growers use antibiotics to combat bacterial infections in their crops, sometimes even of produce marked “organic.” This means we humans are unwittingly eating antibiotics, rendering them ineffective when we need them for a real disease/infection.

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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. If the book has any takeaway, it is that lifestyle is important. Exercises is tremendously beneficial; and inactivity is likewise lethal. A good diet makes a big difference, too, as does avoiding obviously harmful activities like smoking and excessive drinking. Our bad habits in the United States are partially why we lag behind other developed nations in life expectancy. As Bryson also points out, our health system is not particularly good, either, despite the enormous costs involved (several times the prices in other countries). Indeed, the American health system is not only lagging behind other countries, but is actively creating problems. The most obvious example of this is the opioid epidemic, which is largely caused by overprescribing pain medication. And the reason that these medications are only overprescribed in America, it seems, is the unsavory relationship between doctors and drug companies.