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Review | The Body: A Guide for Occupants – Bill Bryson turns his wry gaze onto the human form

The American author’s latest book is as eye-opening as it is entertaining, if at times philosophically floppy

Readers will learn that certain organs are not where we might expect and the largest single source of food poisoning is green vegetables

Reading Time:5 minutes

In The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson offers his uniquely wry take on the human form. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 10:30pm, 2 Nov 2019Updated: 11:49am, 6 Nov 2019

The Body: A Guide for Occupants
by Bill Bryson
Doubleday
3.5/5 stars

School biology teachers, rejoice. The students who filled your labs but paid only drowsy attention to long explanations of meiosis and mitosis are likely now lining up for Bill Bryson’s latest bound-to-be bestseller, The Body: A Guide for Occupants. Your message will finally get through – if not in detail then at least in substance.

Discussing respiration, for instance, Bryson writes that what we breathe in is 80 per cent nitrogen, which “goes into your lungs and straight back out again, like an absent-minded shopper who has wandered into the wrong store”.

This your former students will remember. This is why Bryson earns the big bucks.

The American author, much of whose adult life has been spent in Britain, came to public notice in the 1990s with drily comic observations of his adopted home that charmed even the British. He went on to publish wry accounts of travel elsewhere, and to make lightly amusing reading even of endless, friendless evenings spent in bars.

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