People who should read this: those who really, really enjoy book reports. People who should absolutely not read this: trans people, people with chroniPeople who should read this: those who really, really enjoy book reports. People who should absolutely not read this: trans people, people with chronic pain, fat people, anyone with a degree in any aspect of biology, anyone who reads more than one popular science book a year.
The thing is, there are basically three ways you can go with a book like this. There’s the complete and in-depth approach, which is absolutey ruled out here; you can’t cover the human body completely in four years of medical school, never mind in a single book. Then there’s the fun facts approach, which Mary Roach has absolutely perfected; you give a brief overview and then you delve into interesting and possibly amusing things your reader probably doesn’t know. That’s where I thought this was going. And then there’s the massively oversimplified, somewhat dull book report, and that’s where this unfortunately ended up. This reads like Bryson read approximately 400 books, summarized each one in a single page, and then added an introduction and a conclusion.
And that’s a problem. The reason each of those books was written was that their topics could not be adequately covered in a page. So every time I happened upon an area about which I already knew some things � or when I’d read the same book Bryson had for that particular bit � I found myself hissing, “But you’re MISSING THE POINT� or “But that’s � that’s so superficial it’s actually inaccurate� or just “Seriously? Seriously??�
I had particular concerns about his discussions of sex and sex chromosomes, which was so simplified and bad that it pretty much went directly to a TERF place. (The problems start with him saying everyone has two sex chromosomes, and that if you have XX you are always female and if you have XY you are always male, and then they sort of go on from there. Biology is more complicated than your fifth-grade-level overview suggests.) He also manages a neatly internally contradictory discussion of the Death Fat that spans over multiple chapters. (Especially enjoyed him explaining in one chapter some of the reasons humans are fatter today than previously, only to explain in another chapter that we all just eat too much and don’t exercise enough. Also there’s a good bit where he explains that fat is definitely killing everyone early, only to point out a bit later that some of the fattest populations on the planet are also the longest-lived. And so on.) There’s also a fun spot where he describes Alexis St. Martin, who was an intensively mistreated victim of constant unethical experimentation by a physician, as “not the most cooperative of subjects.� There’s a lot of stuff like that, that Bryson lightly glosses over and really, really should not.
When the book’s not enraging, it’s just dull. Bryson mostly elides his own narrative voice, which is his main strength as a writer, in favor of pretending to be an authority, so we get an endless dull recitation of facts that many readers already know. (And many of which we learned from more engaging books than this one.)
This book left me sad and frustrated and took me so long to slog through it messed up my holds at the library. A solid loser, all the way around. ...more
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