Bryson delights in our physical oddities, and his sense of wonder is infectious. How fantastic that there is such a thing as the Belly Button Biodiversity Project (run by North Carolina State University) that has discovered 1,458 species in bacteria new to science in people’s navels! How astounding that a man hiccupped for 67 years straight! As you’ve likely gathered from his other work, he loves a good statistic, and while this book is full of numbers and percentages, they are accessible rather than obfuscating, and will make you shake your head in amazement.

We thus hear of the abominable Typhoid Mary, a women who, at one point, found out she was one of the rare carriers of typhoid without showing any symptoms, but decided to still work in kitchens (against a promise she had made to the authorities) and didn't even bother to wash her hands before preparing meals, thus spreading the disease until she was finally put under house arrest.If you’ve ever wondered why no one wants to kiss you first thing in the morning, it is possibly because your exhalations may contain up to 150 different chemical compounds” including “methyl mercaptan (which smells like very old cabbage), hydrogen sulphide (like rotten eggs), dimethyl sulphide (slimy seaweed)”, etc. Delivery with Standard Australia Post usually happens within 2-10 business days from time of dispatch. Please be aware that the delivery time frame may vary according to the area of delivery and due to various reasons, the delivery may take longer than the original estimated timeframe. I read this off and on for over a week, I think reading it straight through would not have left me time to ponder the information and possibly would have been a case of too much at one time. Our bodies, many systems and other developments of which I knew little all in one book. I actually own a copy because this is another that I feel deserves more than read. Or at least to have as a reference.

Even with the advantage of clothing, shelter and boundless ingenuity, humans can manage to live on only about 12 per cent of Earth’s land area” Until now, I only knew Bill Bryson for his snarky travelogues. My buddy-reader, however, informed me that his non-fiction book was very good indeed. Besides, many biology books suffer from the fact that their authors are great scientists but horrible writers. So I wanted to read something that had the potential to be entertaining as well as educational. The extraordinary story of what we are made of and how we work ... This revelatory book reads as captivatingly as a thriller. Teresa Levonian Cole, Country Life A wonderful successor to A Short History of Nearly Everything, this new book is an instant classic. It will have you marvelling at the form you occupy, and celebrating the genius of your existence, time and time again. The ideal gift for readers of every age who wish to discover more about themselves.It is a feat of narrative skill to bake so many facts into an entertaining and nutritious book.' Daily Telegraph

A wonderful successor to A Short History of Nearly Everything, this new book is an instant classic. It will have you marvelling at the form you occupy, and celebrating the genius of your existence, time and time again.it constitutes 10 percent of all our genetic material. No one has any idea why. The mysterious part was for a while called junk DNA but now is more graciously called dark DNA, meaning that we don’t know what it does or why it is there. don't smoke or do drugs and drink alcohol moderately As with so much in life, getting the balances right is delicate business. Altogether there are about seven thousand rare diseases – so many that about one person in seventeen in the developed world has one, which isn’t very rare at all. But, sadly, so long as a disease affects only a small number of people it is unlikely to get much research attention. For 90 per cent of rare diseases there are no effective treatments at all.” Regardless, both authors had similar impulses: to communicate science, medicine, history, geography, what-have-you, simply, for anyone to read. It's not controversial to observe that the hallowed world of academia tends to look down upon such works (the implicit argument is that something so ambitious is necessarily a work of synthesis, not research) — but it's fascinating to note that for many, like myself, who ended up in academia, a work like A Short History may just have been a pivotal push in the right direction.