One of my pandemic silver linings has been re-establishing a regular reading habit. I plan on recapping my reading in these short overviews, with quick summary information and quotes for anyone looking for their next book.

Published: 2019

Read: January 2021

Publisher Summary: 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 Brysonesque anecdotes, The Body will lead you to a deeper understanding of the miracle that is life in general and you in particular.

Genre: Science

Rating: 9/10

Who Should Read This?

• Everyone
• Seriously
• This book is a fascinating must-read

Skimmable? You won’t even want to.

Notable Quotables:

• We each trail behind us about a pound of dust every year.
• If you have blue or green eyes, it’s not because you have more of those colors in your irises than other people but because you simply have less of other colors. It is the paucity of other pigments that leaves the eyes looking blue or green.
• If you put all Earth’s microbes in one heap and all the other animal life in another, the microbe heap would be twenty-five times greater than the animal one. Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them.
• For each visual input, it takes a tiny but perceptible amount of time—about two hundred milliseconds, one-fifth of a second—for the information to travel along the optic nerves and into the brain to be processed and interpreted. One-fifth of a second is not a trivial span of time when a rapid response is required—to step back from an oncoming car, say, or to avoid a blow to the head. To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet.
• Much later, primates re-evolved the ability to see reds and oranges, the better to identify ripe fruit, but we still have just three kinds of color receptors compared with four for birds, fish, and reptiles. It’s a humbling fact, but virtually all nonmammalian creatures live in a visually richer world than we do.
• Altogether the liver takes part in some five hundred metabolic processes. It is essentially the body’s laboratory. Right now, about a quarter of all your blood is in your liver…Perhaps the most wondrous feature of the liver is its capacity to regenerate. You can remove two-thirds of a liver and it will grow back to its original size in just a few weeks.
• Because muscle is so expensive to maintain, we sacrifice muscle tone really quickly when we are not using it. Studies by NASA have shown that astronauts even on short missions—from five to eleven days—lose up to 20 percent of muscle mass.
• At the back of your head is a modest ligament, not found on other apes, that instantly betrays what it is about us that allowed us to thrive as a species. It is the nuchal ligament, and it has just one job: to hold the head steady when running. And running—serious, dogged, long-distance running—is the one thing we do superlatively well.
• As well as strengthening bones, exercise boosts your immune system, nurtures hormones, lessens the risk of getting diabetes and a number of cancers (including breast and colorectal), improves mood, and even staves off senility.
• Children do much better with extreme cold than with extreme heat. Because their sweat glands aren’t fully developed, they don’t sweat freely as adults do.
• Even with the advantage of clothing, shelter, and boundless ingenuity, humans can manage to live on only about 12 percent of Earth’s land area and just 4 percent of the total surface area if you include the seas. It is a sobering thought that 96 percent of our planet is off-limits to us.
• In breathing, as in everything in life, the numbers are staggering—indeed fantastical. Every time you breathe, you exhale some 25 sextillion (that’s 2.5 x 1022) molecules of oxygen—so many that with a day’s breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived. And every person who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe in a bit of you. At the atomic level, we are in a sense eternal.
• The technical term for gut rumblings is “borborygmi.”
• On a Presidential visit to a farm, Mrs. Coolidge asked her guide how many times the rooster copulated daily. “Dozens of times” was the reply. “Please tell that to the President,” Mrs. Coolidge requested. When the President passed the pens and was told about the rooster, he asked: “Same hen every time?” “Oh no, Mr. President, a different one each time.” The President nodded slowly, then said: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”
• It is a curious fact that every woman is born with her lifetime’s supply of eggs already inside her. They are formed when she is still in the womb and sit in the ovaries for years and years before being called into play.
• As well as nurturing symbiotic bacteria, breast milk is full of antibodies. There is some evidence that a nursing mother absorbs a little of her suckling baby’s saliva through her breast ducts and that this is analyzed by her immune system, which adjusts the amount and types of antibodies she supplies to the baby, according to its needs. Isn’t life marvelous?
• Some people live longer than they ought to by any known measures. As Jo Marchant notes in her book Cure, Costa Ricans have only about one-fifth the personal wealth of Americans, and have poorer health care, but live longer. Moreover, people in one of the poorest regions of Costa Rica, the Nicoya Peninsula, live longest of all, even though they have much higher rates of obesity and hypertension. They also have longer telomeres. The theory is that they benefit from closer social bonds and family relationships. Curiously, it was found that if they live alone or don’t see a child at least once a week, the telomere length advantage vanishes. It is an extraordinary fact that having good and loving relationships physically alters your DNA. Conversely, a 2010 U.S. study found, not having such relationships doubles your risk of dying from any cause.