The Body: A Guide for Occupants - Bill Bryson (re-read)

This is my first time reading The Body since its initial release. Like all Bryson books, it’s an entertaining, funny read. Bryson’s books generally fall into two categories: travelogues, in which Bryson chronicles his journey through a particular part of the world, and researched books, in which he chooses a subject and explains it in layman’s terms. The Body, as the name suggests, is among the latter.

Bryson’s output has skewed towards research books in his later years, quite possibly because he’s less inclined to take long journeys. He is very good at both, and while the travelogues tend to be funnier (I would count his funniest book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, among this group, even though the “travel” is through his own childhood), The Body still includes humour through bizarre anecdotes and clever turns of phrase. The overall content, however, is educational, as Bryson works his way through the human body section by section, branching off near the end into disease and medicine. The final chapter, fittingly enough, deals with death, and the process of dying. It ends a bit abruptly, but then again so does life in a lot of cases, so perhaps that’s fitting in its way.

Bryson peppers his chapters with anecdotes about figures in medicine and biology both famous and obscure, charting medical breakthroughs and quack remedy fads with equal relish. He has always had an ear for bizarre stories and seems to delight in bringing forgotten heroes a bit of posthumous fame.

There isn’t a Bill Bryson book I haven’t read at least once, and nearly all of them I’ve gone through multiple times. It saddens me to hear that he intends for The Body to be his last book, but he’s certainly earned his retirement. Nevertheless, I can’t say I’m not hoping that boredom gets the better of him and he finds his way into a new one at some point.

Note: in preparing the tags for this entry, I discovered I’ve already written about this book once before! Oh well, interesting to capture my views on it a second time.

The Body: a guide for occupants - bill bryson

You can divide Bill Bryson's books into two categories. First are his more narrative works, which are generally travelogues (though I would count Thunderbolt Kid among this group as well), and comprise longer stories of his experiences supplemented with occasional diversions. Second would be his educational works, which choose a subject and explore its deepest chasms for nuggets of arcane interest.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants, as the name suggests, is of the second type, and its subject is self-evident. Bryson leads the reader through the body's many components, as well as branching of into related topics such as medicine. There are small anecdotes peppered throughout, but little in the way of narrative.

In his later years, Bryson has transitioned from a writer primarily of his first type to his second, and while his research is impressive and his writing always informative, I must say I like him best in a more narrative mood, as his gifts for description and flow often go unrealized in his educational books. There's also less room for his humor to reach its full momentum, though no Bryson book is without it’s funny lines. I enjoyed this one, but it may be a while before I read it again, and unlikely that it will enter tier one rotation along with his greatest works, like Thunderbolt Kid, A Walk in the Woods, and A Short History of Nearly Everything (his finest educational book).