The Body: A Guide for Occupants

Written by Bill Bryson

Narrated by Bill Bryson

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD

"Glorious. . .You will marvel at the brilliance and vast weirdness of your design." —The Washington Post

Bill Bryson, bestselling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, takes us on a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body. As addictive as it is comprehensive, this is Bryson at his very best, a must-read owner's manual for everybody.

Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body--how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately) the ways it can fail. Full of extraordinary facts (your body made a million red blood cells since you started reading this) and irresistible Bryson-esque anecdotes, The Body will lead you to a deeper understanding of the miracle that is life in general and you in particular. As Bill Bryson writes, "We pass our existence within this wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted." The Body will cure that indifference with generous doses of wondrous, compulsively readable facts and information.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780147526922

Reviews for The Body

[hccpsk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Body is exactly what you would expect from Bill Bryson: an engaging overview of the human body and many of its systems told in his witty style. Bryson manages to go into detail without getting too bogged down and keeps things simple enough for anyone to understand.

[kokeyama · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fun book about the human body and it's parts and processes. The author goes into enough detail to be useful, but avoids getting mired in too much minutia. Definitely recommend.

[pnwkatie · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I liked this for the historical info, but found several sections with old science

[foof2you · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another great book by Bill Bryson! In this book Bryson looks at the human body and how it works. He also tells us about the various people who found cures and the quacks who did more ham and those who stole others ideas.

[castlelass · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Bill Bryson takes the reader on a tour of the human body. It is well-organized by type of function. It is a book of popular science, geared toward the non-scientist. It is a compilation of secondary sources, anecdotes, and historical episodes. Bryson dispels a few myths and imparts useful facts about health.

This author is known for his humor, but this book is not particularly humorous. In fact, a strong stomach will be needed for a few segments. There is a good amount of repetition that probably should have been edited out. I think your reaction to it will depend on how much of this material you have already heard (or read). I read science books regularly, so I was already familiar with most of this information. It is reasonably entertaining but if you are looking for scientific analysis, there are other books I would recommend ahead of this one.

[indygo88 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson examines the various organs and systems of the human body, complete with statistics and evolving trends relating to illness, disease, and current medicine in today's world, and he does so with typical Billy Bryson fact presentation mixed with subtle humor. It always amazes me, when I stop to really think about it, how the body is such a complex and miraculous thing, both at the molecular level and as a sum of many parts, all working together. It's really quite amazing, and we tend to take it for granted. This reminded me a lot of some of Mary Roach's books, which I also enjoy. The thing that really hit me hard was how the U.S., despite all of the money it spends on healthcare and medicine (much more than any other nation in comparison) ranks quite low in so many categories. This shouldn't surprise me given the status of where this country is currently, and I guess I'm not surprised so much as depressed after reading some of these statistics. This book was published in 2019, the year before Covid hit hard. It would have been interesting to hear Bryson's take on that (had it been released a year later), and I think it would have added quite a bit to Chapter 20 ("When Things Go Wrong: Diseases"). But overall it was a good read. Some aspects of the book were a good refresher for me; others were quite enlightening.

[ashishg_50 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In his inimical style, Bill Bryson lays bare all about human body, from working of various body parts and organ systems, to what causes and preventz diseases, to discovery and invention of medical sciences, to impact and consequences of lifestyle, making this book a packed capsule for anyone wanting to know and understand what a wonder human body (and by extension, living organism) is. Even in my limited pedestrian understanding, there are as many wonders inside our body as there are in the rest of universe.

While I knew most of the major stuff in the book beforehand and hence incremental value for me was limited, I can appreciate how this book will boost a typical person's awareness manifold. However capturing a very technical subject full of jargons in layperson book was always going to be hard, and hence despite running in over 400 pages, book feels just rushing through topics many times, or explaining external symptoms rather than internal workings. I will not blame Bill for this, but this and perhaps slightly less quantity of funny quips than is his usual style, can earn less than absolute delight for after reading this book.

Book is eminently suitable for kids too, as most his books are, and except for one or two chapters on reproductive organs, depending on your parental judgement, can be read by or read to kids aa young as five years old. Like his other book 'Short History of Nearly Everything,' this should indeed be read to kids to ignite the scientific temperament and wonderful awe.

[kwskultety · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!

Did you ever wonder how many times a day you blink? Or who invented the calorie and why we are so obsessed with counting them? These answers and a multitude of others can be found in THE BODY, a wonderfully wry book of facts and stories about, well, the body we occupy. Each chapter is devoted to one of the body’s systems (the gut, the nervous system, as well as sleep and the function of glands, etc) so as to build upon the last chapter’s information. Here’s an interesting factoid from the food chapter: fruits have been genetically manipulated to be sweeter than they were hundreds of years ago. The author purports that apples in Shakespeare’s day were no sweeter than today’s carrots.

I’m trying to decide whether Bryson’s droll wit or the abundance of information about our body is the best part of the book. You will end up learning things without even trying – there isn’t any deep scientific talk so you don’t need a degree in biology to easily read this book.

There isn’t a plot so much as a description of the body part, its function, and then facts and history about it. For example, in the chapter entitled “Gut” we learn how our digestive system works, then we learn about E. coli and other dangerous microbes, there is a bit about food safety, and then it’s 1822 and we are reading about an unfortunate accident that left a hole in a fur trapper’s stomach. This fur trapper eventually became something of a living experiment due to the injury (Google “Beaumont and St Martin” for more details if you wish).

This was an illuminating and droll read – one of the better books I have read this summer. Run, don’t walk to get your copy! You will be thoroughly enlightened and entertained, and even a bit grossed out - in a good way.

[fliss88_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Bill Bryson makes science very interesting! This is full of facts and figures but oh boy, what an amazing bunch of facts and figures! I couldn’t get enough of them. If you’re even the slightest bit interested in how your body functions and repairs itself, read this book. If you want to know about the incredible people who discovered and developed the drugs, machines and surgical procedures that save millions of us every day, read this book. I tell you no fibs. This is such an eye opener. It’s not in the least bit boring or hard to comprehend. Initially I thought I’d never get through the 614 pages but here’s the thing, there’s only 437 pages of reading. The rest is made up of an afterword, notes on sources, bibliography and acknowledgements.

[miaculpa-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bill Bryson has been around so long that his newborn children he referenced in his earlier travel books are now parents themselves or, in the case of son David, a paediatric orthopaedic fellow. How much influence Dr Bryson had in the formation of The Body is not noted but presumably Bryson snr. knew that he at least had someone to bother with any questions.

Bryson covers the key areas of the human body, as well as many that should be more well known than they are, and shows that we still know very little about our bodies and how they work, especially so with women's bodies. There have been some wonderful medical advancements in the past century which see us living longer lives but, as Bryson points out, if you have Alzheimer's today, medicine is no more help than it was 120 years ago.

While Bryson is one of the finest writers today and The Body an easy read, considering its topic, I could never shake the preference that I'd rather read another of Bryson's travelogues.

[steve02476 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fun to read, as Bryson’s books always are. Lots of interesting tidbits, but maybe not any big theme or proposition. Lots of two-page-long mini-biographies of people who did important or just plain weird things whose names haven’t been remembered and each of them probably deserve their own book.

[passion4reading_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Body: A Guide for Occupants is described as an 'owner's manual for everybody'. Bill Bryson takes the reader on a tour of the human body, from head to toe and from conception and birth to death, covering the major organs and systems as well as what happens when things go wrong (in chapters on diseases and cancer). His warm and engaging prose makes the subject matter accessible for anyone interested in a human's inner workings and is filled with jaw-dropping facts, fascinating statistics and interesting anecdotes, giving the reader a new appreciation for the bag of bones we call our body. The book is both entertaining and educational, based on the latest research in the field, though I often wished he had gone into more depth on a particular topic, but then I have a background in nursing; for anyone coming to the topic without prior knowledge, it is probably pitched about right.

I particularly enjoyed learning about the pioneers in anatomy and physiology (almost invariably men, since medicine was, until fairly recently, a male prerogative), occasionally paying with their lives (when studying tropical diseases, for example), and who are now often all but forgotten.

If there's one criticism, it's that the statistics are heavily UK- and US-centric, when it would have been interesting to read about perspectives from other countries and continents, but maybe this would have exceeded the scope of the book.

[fionaanne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bryson does not disappoint; informative and clever, with a touch of philosophy about our own mortality.

[smorton11 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Body was one of my few audiobooks last year, I listened to remarkably few compared to previous years. I decided to finally listen to it while I was going through my own health scare last spring and, well, I guess I wanted to torture myself? Hoping for something along the lines of Mary Roach’s Stiff or Bonk, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to feel while listening – would I be terrified? Convinced I would die immediately? Or, hopefully, find something to laugh about?

Caveat – this book is written by a straight boomer white man. There are certain things that one would like to have seen more diversity in discussing, but was not included, most likely due to the author’s own internal bias whether intentional or not. While this did not change my enjoyment of the book, I’m sure it will affect how others will view it while reading or listening.

I tend to do nonsensical things sometimes – for instance, I listened to The Body when I was going through scans and testing for breast cancer (which I thankfully did not and do not have). I tend to hate reading about the things that scare me, or potentially trigger me, so my choice of book and time of reading shocked a couple of my friends and family. But oddly, it was actually helpful. In reading about all the other things that could go wrong in my body, breast cancer didn’t seem quite so scary.

Bryson starts at the head and works his way down to your toes, stopping to discuss different systems in the body along the way. It is pure pop science – there are entire books written about things that receive no more than a sentence in The Body, but I find that’s to be expected – this is a book for the lay person, not a doctor. As someone with a small medical background (I was originally pre-med in college and have taken many chemistry classes as well as science education classes), I felt like the perfect audience – I had enough background knowledge to be able to thoroughly enjoy the tour through the body. It would be the perfect book club book, for when book club discussions ultimately wind up with people saying, “I didn’t fully understand that part, Sarah can you go into teacher mode and help us understand?” No one actually says that verbatim, but I do frequently find myself in the position of sharing my background knowledge with others.

What this book is not, is Mary Roach funny. Bryson doesn’t insert himself into the narrative quite as much as he does with his travel memoirs or as Mary frequently does in her books. I read Mary’s Fuzz (review to come) at the same time I was listening to The Body and frequently found myself gravitating more towards Mary’s writing over Bryson’s. Mary’s natural inquisitiveness drives her nonfiction from page to page but there were definitely parts of The Body that I could tell Bryson was less interested in.

Overall, it was an enjoyable book to listen to and helped me pass the time in doctor’s offices and hospitals when I couldn’t bring myself to focus on a physical book in front of me, and for that, it will always hold a special place in my reading history.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This layperson's guide to anatomy, physiology, and some related topics is a good read in the Bryson manner -- clear, amusing, and easy to follow. I didn't find it quite so enjoyable as "A Short History", or "At Home". That may be due, however, that a book on this topic almost inevitably sparks some anxiety in the reader, particularly if said reader is over 75. Nonetheless, I recommend the book to those who want to learn more about how they work.

[hardlyhardy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Bill Bryson repeats himself in his masterful 2019 book “The Body: A Guide for Occupants,” and the refrain that he repeats over and over again is something along the lines of "nobody knows."

Why do we sleep? Why do we dream? Why has the human brain shrunk over thousands of years? Why can't humans regenerate damaged heart tissue the way so many lower animals can? Why do men go bald? Why do we itch when someone just mentions the word itch? Why are women born with a lifetime supply of eggs within them and yet lose so many of them as the years pass? And so the unanswered questions pile up as the pages fly by.

And yet for all that science still does not know about the human body, it has learned a great deal, and Bryson packs a lot of it into his book without ever making it read like a medical textbook. In fact, virtually every paragraph contains some fascinating tidbit that a reader will yearn to share with someone else. He tells great stories about medical pioneers, presents statistics whose impact are more jaw-dropping than mind-fogging, and amazes readers with details about what our bodies do for us while we're busy doing something else.

Like most great explainers, Bryson has a gift for metaphors. He says things like this:

"Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding."

"Each component of the cell responds to signals from other components, all of them bumping and jostling like so many bumper cars, yet somehow all this random motion results in smooth coordinated action, not just across the cell but across the whole body as cells communicate with other cells in different parts of your personal cosmos."

To the tiny mites that live on your scalp, he says, your skin is "like a giant crusty bowl of cornflakes."

This being Bill Bryson, he offers lots of trivia just because it is interesting, whether or not it is actually relevant to his subject matter. For example, the respected British medical journal The Lancet got its name from the instrument used for bleeding patients, back when bleeding was thought to be a wise medical treatment. Or, the most popular vegetable in the United States is the french fry. Or, one study found 2,368 different species of bacteria in 60 random American belly buttons.

You could host a party at which guests take turns reading random lines from “The Body.” Add food and drink, and a good time would be had by all.

[mojomomma_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Bryson looks at each of the body systems in turn, explaining how we've come to our current understanding, and how much we have yet to understand.

[starkravingmad_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

for anyone who reads anatomy books, this will be a disappointment, but for those who would like an Owner's Guide, this is it.

[capewood · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

2020 Book #4. 2019. A book about the wonders of the human body: how it works and how things may go wrong. If you tend toward hypochondria this book may kill you. Good read but got a little depressing toward the end when he discusses old age problems (to close to home for me).

[murderbydeath · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another book I own but borrowed in audio from the library. Also another read by the author, though Bryson does almost all of his own books and I’ve always enjoyed his readings.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants is an overview of the human body, taking it system by system. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but looking through my hard copy, I can see it includes photos, making me think this is yet another book destined to be re-visited as a read, rather than a listen. No hardship, as Bryson is an excellent writer, and The Body is no exception. He covers the basics, plus just that little bit more, offering what might perhaps be new information, or a different perspective, or a fresh historical anecdote. He also doesn’t pull any punches about humanity’s propensity to overeat and under exercise, something that in (what is for me) these post-lockdown days had a more pronounced effect than they might otherwise have had pre-covid.

I don’t think fans of Bryson will be disappointed.

[infjsarah · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very light tour around the bits of the human body and health. Enjoyable. The chapter on infectious diseases did make cringe ironically though - if we'd only known!

[nmele_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm not a big fan of Bill Bryson, and this book suffers a bit from advances in human biology which make some parts of this book out of date. Still, there is a lot of useful information in here, presented in Bryson's light and effortless-seeming style.

[dualmon · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Bryson is always a great read

[gabrielbckr · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's not a guide but rather a good book about the history of medical science. It reveals a lot of misconceptions about deceases and treatments that are commom sense even between physicians (part of them, I hope) and shows how badly US performs in health care compared to other industrialized countries.

[Nurse85 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I liked it very much... I'm not one for reading essays since I only read those on topics that interest or attract me a lot... And without a doubt, the theme attracted me immensely.

The book is thoroughly documented, and the author's way of narrating is spectacular... He is a true genius when it comes to linking topics and making the reading very enjoyable and interesting... It is certainly a pleasure to learn a lot from such extraordinary books as this one.

As a single negative point, I would highlight that most of the data is very focused only on the population of the U.S.A. I would also say that regarding infectious diseases, it is somewhat outdated since it was written before the COVID pandemic, and it is quite shocking not to have it in mind now that this disease has produced a before and after in the history of human health.

But as I said, 100% recommended since we all have a body, we are all occupants of it, and therefore it is worth getting to know it. (Translated from Spanish)

[griffin22 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Full of fascinating facts!

[daniel5estes · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Bill Bryson writes books the way other people get advanced degrees. He somehow manages to distill a lifetime of information into something resembling a master's class for the reading masses. It's all wonderful and moderately intimidating how much knowledge there is in the world. And Bryson is only illuminating a small fraction of a small fraction of it.

Here's my three big takeaways from The Body: A Guide for Occupants. (1) My decision to not work in the medical field was the correct one. The bloodier the chapter, the more uncomfortable I was reading it. (2) Cancer frightens me even more now that I understand it better. Same for diseases. And (3) it was genuinely surprising how much science still doesn't know about the body. So many descriptions of organs or afflictions are concluded by saying, "...and we still don't know what X does or how Y occurs."

This book was published in 2019, and I'm sure it's been noted elsewhere but Bryson comes chillingly close to predicting the COVID-19 pandemic less than a year later. Here are a few quotes.

"A successful virus is one that doesn't kill too well and can circulate widely. That's what makes flu such a perennial threat ... The great Spanish flu of 1918 racked up a global death toll of tens of millions—some estimates put it as high as a hundred million—not by being especially lethal but by being persistent and highly transmissible. It killed only about 2.5 percent of victims, it is thought. Ebola would be more effective—and in the long run more dangerous—if it mutated a milder version that didn't strike such panic into communities and made it easier for victims to mingle with unsuspecting others."

"'The fact is,' [Washington University's Michael Kinch] says, 'we are really no better prepared for a bad outbreak today than we were when Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people a hundred years ago. The reason we haven't had another experience like that isn't because we have been especially vigilant. It's because we have been lucky."

For all of its bloody and frustrating details, the human body really is a wonderous miracle of nature. And it's all the more special because of its limits, and not in spite of them. Life really is a slow roll to the grave, and when we're at our best we do everything we can to slow that roll as much as possible. But death is still inevitable. It's implied several times over that what looks like a loss for the individual turns out to be a gain for the species. Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, from The Body and a grim thought: "Cancer is the price we pay for evolution."

[juliestielstra · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A geek-out book for people fascinated by human physiology and medicine, this is a typically Brysonesque take similar to his previous writings on Australia, England, and the concept of "home." He takes the human body, almost literally head to toe, and dissects, describes, and genially tells all manner of weird facts and stories, liberally laced with numbers: "...you are likely to have something like 40,000 species of microbes calling you home - 300 in your nostrils, 800 more on your insides cheeks, 1300 next door on your gums, as many as 36,00 in your gastrointestinal tract..." That's *species,* not actual numbers. All told, "you are roughly 99 percent bacterial." There's lots of this. There are also lots of pretty good stories about the famous and unfamous scientists who discovered or invented drugs, processes, diseases - Bryson is particularly good on the unfamous ones who he feels got the shaft. (Notably one Schatz, whose quiet discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin led only to his imperious boss and employer ripping him off completely, taking all the credit and pharmaceutical profits AND a Nobel prize. He finally sued them, and won, though.)

Not as funny as Bryson usually is, this one is a bit rambling and uneven. I could wish he'd spent a bit more good-humored space on some aspects of quackery, ripoffs and other medicinal nonsense (anti-vaxxers, I'm looking at you...). I can see chapters of this being useful to high school science teachers as an accessible source for students to read. Mostly just kind of fun if you're into this sort of thing.

[bergs47 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really choose the wrong time to read this book. Its not the best read in the midst of the epidemic. I think I now have 278 viruses that I never knew I had before. Scary , oh so scary.

[mlhershey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fascinating and entertaining. A great book to listen to!