The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill BrysonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This really was a wild book - a buffet of crazy facts about our bodies and it was was not for one small moment dull or pedantic. I took my time with it and read a few pages every night. So it has been with me for months and I'll miss it, I really will. Of course, reading Bill Bryson is like listening to a great conversationalist. His delivery is so darn affable.
Some of my very favorite take-aways:
"Almost three-quarters of the forty million antibiotic prescriptions written each year in the United States are for conditions that cannot be cured with antibiotics."
"The fact is that odors and flavors are created entirely inside our heads"
“Race is one millimeter deep. Intrepidly attending the dissection of a corpse", Bryson quotes the surgeon who pulled back a minute layer of skin and said: “That’s all that race is – a sliver of epidermis.”
“Altogether, 80 percent of all autoimmune diseases occur in women. Hormones are the presumed culprit, but how exactly female hormones trip up the immune system when male hormones don’t is not at all clear.”
“Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them.”
“Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them.”
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