Parts of a whole: Great reads about the human body

Here’s a list of books on being human, being dead, being a woman — and they’re all immensely readable.

Those looking to dive into Bill Bryson’s recent book, The Body, might find it’s more of a handshake than a hug.

His 2003 doorstopper, A Short History of Nearly Everything, covered, well, everything: the composition of the Earth, what killed the dinosaurs, what goes on inside cells and atoms, and how scientists found it all out. And it did so with such wry wit and tongue-in-cheek commentary that experts in every field have attempted to write lucid explainers of their own ever after.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants is lucid and wry. Bryson reveals what I’ve long suspected — that our tongues don’t have sweet, sour, bitter zones (tastes are more complicated, even accounting for umami). And, surprisingly, that we get cancer every day; our immune system simply fights those cells off. That I’ll shed 500 gm of skin from now until December (don’t worry, so will you). And that there is a global average size for the human penis — find it three-fourths into the book.

Bryson isn’t as much fun this time around, though. There are scary facts, but few juicy ones. There are euphemisms but almost no puns. Meanwhile other authors have delved deeper into our insides and emerged with shinier gems.

Illuminating a nether region is The Wonder Down Under: A User’s Guide to the Vagina. Nina Brochmann and Ellen Stokken Dahl, Norwegian sexual health educators, take all the mystery, shame and social baggage out of the organ. What remains are biology, humour and tonnes of warmth. And that two Norwegian women can come up with better Benedict Cumberbatch references than Bryson can.

Also better, and among the few things in the world can be described as morbid, hilarious and enlightening, is Mary Roach’s Stiff. You’ll see corpses differently after her accounts of how dead bodies have helped science — from cosmetic surgery to crash testing, army experiments and decomposition experiments for cell studies. Your body, it turns out, is especially useful after you’ve signed out.

In Adventures in Human Being, surgeon Gavin Francis tackles the body from head to toe, through mythology and history, goo and gore, across 18 essays. But he’s conscious on every page that bodies belong to people: pickpockets, troubled teens, policemen, drunks. We’re more than a collection of cells.

As Bryson puts it: “All this random chaotic activity results in a completely sentient, active, thinking human being.” If only his book were more like one too.