Page 15 - Boca Exposure - January '20

Boca Exposure, Page 15
Book Review

The Body: A Guide for photographs) is surprisingly new information to those of us thirty pounds of carbon, and
that will cost you $69,550 ...
who – as the subtitle amusingly points out – are “occupants” of
Occupants the book’s subject. Calcium, phosphorus, and
One would think that any person should be familiar with what potassium between them set
By Nils A. Shapiro is going on within oneself, but, unless you have studied medicine, you back a further $73,800
You can’t help but be I can pretty much guarantee that your knowledge of the actual ... All the tin you require
interested in the subject of workings of your body as you read this review is infinitesimal can be yours for six cents
this book – you! compared to what it will be after you have read Bryson’s book. ... The full cost of building
This is author Bill Bryson’s The book is divided into 23 chapters, starting with How to a human being would be a
20th book, almost all of which Build a Human and closing with The End. Among the other very precise $151,578.46.
have been instant worldwide chapter subjects: The Outside: Skin and Hair; The Brain; Down Labor and sales tax would,
bestsellers, and one thing you the Hatch: The Mouth and Throat; The Heart and Blood; The of course, boost costs further.
can be certain of: He knows Chemistry Department; The Immune System; Deep Breath:¨The You would probably be lucky
more about you than you Lungs and Breathing; Food, Glorious Food; Sleep; Into the to get a take-home for much
know about yourself. What’s Nether Region; In the Beginning: Conception and Birth; When under $300,000.
more, by the time he finishes Things Go Wrong: Diseases. “Unpacked, you are
describing you in the pages of The Body, he makes you seem a To give you just a taste of the combination of facts and fun positively enormous. Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a
heck of a lot more interesting than anyone who knows you ever that fill this volume. I will excerpt small portions of them here – tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly
thought you were! leaving out most of the text, even whole pages at a time – just to from coast to coast. The length of all your blood vessels would
But before your ego gets too carried away, I should point out make a point. The following is all from only the first five pages take you two and a half times around earth.”
that this book does the same for me, and for every other human of the book, in Chapter 1, How to Build a Human: But even more importantly, there is a thought expressed by
on the planet. “Long ago, when I was a junior high school student in the author – still within the opening chapter – that stayed in my
I ordered this new work by Bill Bryson within a minute Iowa, I remember being taught by a biology teacher that all mind throughout the entire reading of the book, and I suspect
after learning of its publication, knowing that I would want to the chemicals that make up a human body could be bought in will be with me always.
share it with this column’s readers because I had so enjoyed a hardware store for $5.00 or something like that. I don’t recall “No matter what you pay, or how carefully you assemble
one of his earlier books, A Short History of Nearly Everything, the exact sum. It might have been $2.97 or $13.50, but it was the materials, you are not going to create a human being. You
which remains one of the most fascinating in all my literary certainly very little even in 1960s money, and I remember being could call together all the brainiest people who are alive now
experience. In that book the author – a nonscientist himself – astounded at the thought that you could make a slouched and or have ever lived and endow them with the complete sum of
explains such subjects as chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, pimply thing such as me for practically nothing... human knowledge, and they could not between them make a
particle physics, the Big Bang theory, quantum physics and so “It was such a spectacularly humbling revelation that it has single living cell...
on, in clear, nontechnical language and through entertaining stayed with me all these years. The question is, was it true? Are “That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about
stories about scientists’ remarkable research and discoveries, we really worth so little?... us – that we are just a collection of inert components, the same
earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, mass extinctions, and much “Altogether, according to Britain’s Royal Society of stuff you would find in a pile of dirt. I’ve said it before in another
more. He treats even the most serious subjects with a wry sense Chemistry calculations, fifty-nine elements are needed to book, but I believe it’s worth repeating: the only thing special
of humor that makes every page a delight, even as you absorb an construct a human being. Six of these---carbon, oxygen, about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is
encyclopedia’s worth of remarkable information. A Short History hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus---account for 99.1 the miracle of life.”
of Nearly Everything was published in 2005 and sold 300,000 percent of what makes us, but much of the rest is a bit unexpected. No computer, outer space explorer or other marvel of
copies in that year alone; by now its sales have surely reached Who would have thought that we would be incomplete without technology devised by man can compare with you. How
half a million or more on a subject so technical – a testament to some molybdenum inside us, or vanadium, manganese, tin, and appropriate that a book of science should make clear the miracle
the accessibility of the author’s writing style. copper?... – and existence – of your Designer.
My guess is that The Body, which is already on the national “All your oxygen will set you back just $14 and your hydrogen I doubt that, after reading this book, you will ever again
bestseller lists, will do even better. So much of what fills every a little over $26 ... Your nitrogen is a better value still at just forty look in the mirror without marveling with good reason at the
MorseLife-10.25x8- Seabreeze.qxp_Layout 1 11/26/19 11:31 AM Page 1
one of its 383 pages (plus a 16-page section of interesting cents ... But after that it gets pretty expensive ... You need about wonderfulness of you.

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and the

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