Bill Bryson has written many, many books on many, many topics. I swear I've read other books by the same author, but the only one reviewed here is One Summer: America 1927. Which of his other books have I read? For the life of me I can't remember.
Bryson is, by the way, an American author. If he sounds British it's because he's lived there most of his life. I didn't find his writing style in One Summer: America 1927 to be particularly British, but while reading The Body I often wondered which side of the Atlantic he was writing from.
In The Body, a book I found slightly less engaging than One Summer, Bryson takes us on a tour of the human body. Along the way he discusses various breakthroughs in medicine, surgery and our understanding of how our bodies function, all of which he summarizes in two separate discussions of birth and death at the end of the book.
Very few of the physiological details introduced in this book were new to me, though I did find the anecdotes regarding forgotten doctors, barbaric medical treatments and other oddities very interesting. Who knew that the medieval cure for gallstones was so horrific? Who knew that so many doctors and scientists could be so petty when it came to credit for certain discoveries? It's these little bits of trivia that make The Body worth reading, even if some of the descriptions of bodily processes are only there to pad out the book.
On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd give The Body a solid 7. It's not as absorbing as I thought it'd be, but I never found it dull. Compared to the other book by Bryson that I can actually remember reading, it's definitely an inferior effort, but in Bryson's case an inferior effort is still a very readable book. He shows a characteristic command of his subject throughout, he's obviously done his research, and if a better book on the same subject is out there we'll just have to hope we stumble across it.
Related Entries:
沒有留言:
張貼留言