★★★☆☆ The Body: A Guide for Occupants, by Bill Bryson
Amusing, but not Bryson's best
The Body: A Guide for Occupants
Bill Bryson
Amusing, but not Bryson's best
I have recently exhausted myself by working through a bunch of very heavy Fantasy and Science Fiction works, reading for the 2025 Hugo Awards. If you are of the opinion that F&SF is non-serious literature and should never be heavy or strain anyone's intellect, I have news for you. F&SF has as much right to weighty intellectual pretensions as any branch of literature that pretends to be more serious. And the truth is, it tired me out to the point of looking for a light nonfiction read.
If there is a light non-fiction category (aside from self-help and business potboilers), Bill Bryson may be its best writer. He's both entertaining and informative and gets his facts mostly right. Fortunately, I had recently added The Body: A Guide for Occupants to my to-read list, so I got it and read it.
From Bryson's point of view, I am probably the toughest audience for this book. I'm a retired professor of neuroscience, so he's going to have to work hard to tell me things I don't already know, and if he makes a mistake or two, I'm likely to catch them. But I'm here to tell you that I did learn some new stuff. Moreover, although I did catch some mistakes, they were mostly minor, like using the wrong word for something. (For example, although Bryson is aware that the hypothalamus and the thalamus are distinct brain structures, he frequently confuses one for the other.) I had more serious qualms about his insistence that there is no such thing as reality -- only something that our brain constructs that we mistake for reality. I also was not thrilled with his discussion of the science of aging.
My larger dissatisfaction with The Body is that it's not really a book about the body --it's a book about researchers who have investigated the human body. All science writers believe that no reader is actually interested in science. The dogma of science writing says that readers are interested only in people, and that to make science interesting, you must tell yooman stories. Bryson does so with relentless determination. Now, he's good at it. If that's what you want to read, there's no one better.
But I, for one, get satiated with learning quirky details about famous and less famous biologists of the past. I think that Bryson has gotten this balance better in his other books.