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Shelve this next to Being Mortal by Atul Gawande in a collection of books that everyone should read � even if you’re a squeamish hypochondriac or you don’t normally choose nonfiction. Bryson is back on form with his latest, indulging his layman’s curiosity about how the body works. Now, I read a LOT of medical memoirs and popular science. I’ve read entire books about organ transplantation, sleep, dementia, the blood, the heart, evolutionary defects, surgery and so on, but in many cases these go into more detail than I really need and I can find my interest waning. That never happens here. Without ever being superficial or patronizing his readers, the author gives a comprehensive introduction to every organ and body system, moving briskly between engaging anecdotes from medical history and encapsulated research on everything from gut microbes to cancer treatment.

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.

“A study in Switzerland found that flu virus can survive on a banknote for two and a half weeks if it is accompanied by a microdot of snot.�

“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.

“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�

“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.�

This is a congenial and persistently cheerful book, even when discussing illness, scientists whose work was overlooked, and the inevitability of death. What I found most sobering was the observation that, having conquered many diseases and extended our life expectancy, we are now overwhelmingly killed by our lifestyle, mostly a poor diet of processed and sugary foods and a lack of exercise � “we are born with the bodies of hunter–gatherers but pass our lives as couch potatoes.�

A few specific things I learned:

I’ve had a nasty cold for the past two weeks, and this book saved me from making a wasted purchase � I had just put Vitamin C on the shopping list when I read that taking large doses of Vitamin C is ineffectual. That it can cure a cold is an urban myth. Immediately, I crossed it off the list and ate an orange instead.

It takes 72 hours for food to move through a woman’s digestive system and be excreted. I’d always assumed that what I was getting rid of was my last meal � so that if I had a bout of diarrhea I could blame it on what I’d just eaten. I’m now curious to know how it works for flatulence: I’m sure that I get instant flatulence after eating chickpeas, lentils, eggs or cheese. But is that just my imagination? Maybe I’m actually observing the effects of a meal from a few days ago.

A neat thing to know about cold weather; it makes total sense, but had never occurred to me. “Incidentally, the reason your nose runs in chilly weather is the same reason your bathroom windows run with water in chilly weather. In the case of your nose, warm air from your lungs meets cold air coming into the nostrils and condenses, resulting in a drip.�

Favorite passages:

“Your body is a universe of mystery. A very large part of what happens on and within it happens for reasons that we don’t know � very often, no doubt, because there are no reasons. Evolution is an accidental process, after all.�

“Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding.�