The Body: A Guide for Occupants

Pdf Book Name: The Body: A Guide for Occupants
Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Doubleday
Year: 2019
Pages: 424
Language: English
File size: 62354 KB
File format: PDF

The Body: A Guide for Occupants Pdf Book Description:

Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be the incomparable companion since he guides us through the human body–how it works, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (regrettably ) the ways it could fail. Total of extraordinary truth (the body created a thousand red blood cells as you began reading this) and mythical Bryson-esque anecdotes, Your Body will direct you to a deeper comprehension of the wonder that’s life in general and you in particular.

As Bill Bryson writes, “We pass our presence in this Length of flesh and take it almost completely for granted.” Your Body will heal that indifference with ample levels of wondrous, compulsively readable data and data. LONG AGO, WHEN I was a junior high school student in Iowa, I remember being taught by a biology teacher that all the chemicals that make up a human body could be bought in a hardware store for $5.00 or something like that. I don’t recall the actual sum. It might have been $2.97 or $13.50, but it was certainly very little even in 1960s money, and I remember being astounded at the thought that you could make a slouched and pimply thing such as me for practically nothing. It was such a spectacularly humbling revelation that it has stayed with me all these years. The question is, was it true? Are we really worth so little? Many authorities (for which possibly read “science majors who don’t have a date on a Friday”) have tried at various times, mostly for purposes of amusement, to compute how much it would cost in materials to build a human. Perhaps the most respectable and comprehensive attempt of recent years was done by Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry when, as part of the 2013 Cambridge Science Festival, it calculated how much it would cost to assemble all the elements necessary to build the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. (Cumberbatch was the guest director of the festival that year and was, conveniently, a typically sized human.)