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cpope9 's review for:
The Body: A Guide for Occupants
by Bill Bryson
I feel mixed things with this one.
On one hand, as is the case with virtually everything I’ve ready by the author, this is engaging and interesting beyond the average “fun fact” nonfiction book I’ve ready. This flowed smoothly, quickly, and had that can’t-put-it-down quality that you don’t often find in science nonfiction.
On the other hand, having delved into other books that spend 10-100 times the pages to cover the same topic that only gets a tiny couple paragraphs here, there is a real substantial content gap on virtually every page. The author gives the illusion of expertise only to generalize or speculate (or in many cases absolutely refuse to speculate or generalize while providing no useful info) so often that I regularly was left with the thought “yeah, but that’s not the whole story.”
This book isn’t trying to be a deep multi-volume dive into all these topics, but a high level, cursory exploration of things most people do and don’t know about the body. And that’s super helpful. But I can also point to at least one instance in literally every chapter where I am confident scientists and experts would have been triggered to infuriation at how shallow the author engaged with the topic at hand, or at how general his conclusions were despite being implied to be global fact/truth.
I’m addition the author so often says “we just don’t know why XXXX happens” or “we’ve never been able to figure out how XXXX does that” and that just won’t age well at all and it won’t do for me. nor do I feel a lot of those claims are really/probably accurate…but the author doesn’t want to analyze prevailing or historical theories so it’s just easier to dismiss them as a lack of consensus so we can move on to the next interesting fact.
I also like and dislike how science as a broad discipline is painted here. There’s a lot of really bad, racist, sexist, opportunist, and greedy awful aspects of science throughout time. The author tells some well known and shocking unknown tales from the depths of history and it really paints all relevant fields of biological and medical science in a REALLY bad light. This is done while trying to project confidence and accuracy in current scientific conclusions. The author seems to want us to both distrust and laugh at science while also trust it. That philosophical and tonal contradiction is minor but really bothered me. Maybe that nuance and balance is good and I’m just used to being fed false dichotomies, but it constantly jabbed at my values.
Regardless, this book exceeds greatly at what it was trying to be: a high level collection of wildly interesting stories and fun facts about the human body. It so greatly exceeds that I’d say it’s the most entertaining and interesting “fun fact” science nonfiction I’ve read so far.
But I also hated its shallowness, tonal contradictions, over generalizations, refusal to give enough pages to topics that it should have, and certain future irrelevance.
I doubt anyone will regret reading this, but, like me, I expect some will be left seeing the gaps and lack of depth on these complex topics. But it’s a pop science book after all so maybe it just is what it was made to be: a perfectly good nonfiction book.
On one hand, as is the case with virtually everything I’ve ready by the author, this is engaging and interesting beyond the average “fun fact” nonfiction book I’ve ready. This flowed smoothly, quickly, and had that can’t-put-it-down quality that you don’t often find in science nonfiction.
On the other hand, having delved into other books that spend 10-100 times the pages to cover the same topic that only gets a tiny couple paragraphs here, there is a real substantial content gap on virtually every page. The author gives the illusion of expertise only to generalize or speculate (or in many cases absolutely refuse to speculate or generalize while providing no useful info) so often that I regularly was left with the thought “yeah, but that’s not the whole story.”
This book isn’t trying to be a deep multi-volume dive into all these topics, but a high level, cursory exploration of things most people do and don’t know about the body. And that’s super helpful. But I can also point to at least one instance in literally every chapter where I am confident scientists and experts would have been triggered to infuriation at how shallow the author engaged with the topic at hand, or at how general his conclusions were despite being implied to be global fact/truth.
I’m addition the author so often says “we just don’t know why XXXX happens” or “we’ve never been able to figure out how XXXX does that” and that just won’t age well at all and it won’t do for me. nor do I feel a lot of those claims are really/probably accurate…but the author doesn’t want to analyze prevailing or historical theories so it’s just easier to dismiss them as a lack of consensus so we can move on to the next interesting fact.
I also like and dislike how science as a broad discipline is painted here. There’s a lot of really bad, racist, sexist, opportunist, and greedy awful aspects of science throughout time. The author tells some well known and shocking unknown tales from the depths of history and it really paints all relevant fields of biological and medical science in a REALLY bad light. This is done while trying to project confidence and accuracy in current scientific conclusions. The author seems to want us to both distrust and laugh at science while also trust it. That philosophical and tonal contradiction is minor but really bothered me. Maybe that nuance and balance is good and I’m just used to being fed false dichotomies, but it constantly jabbed at my values.
Regardless, this book exceeds greatly at what it was trying to be: a high level collection of wildly interesting stories and fun facts about the human body. It so greatly exceeds that I’d say it’s the most entertaining and interesting “fun fact” science nonfiction I’ve read so far.
But I also hated its shallowness, tonal contradictions, over generalizations, refusal to give enough pages to topics that it should have, and certain future irrelevance.
I doubt anyone will regret reading this, but, like me, I expect some will be left seeing the gaps and lack of depth on these complex topics. But it’s a pop science book after all so maybe it just is what it was made to be: a perfectly good nonfiction book.