When I was a teenager, I had an argument with a close friend about Bill Bryson.
we were both competitive debaters, which meant we were actively looking for broad, masterpieces, like a short history of just about everything, something we could get the most out of as little as possible. It’s easy to imagine precocious teenagers reading Bryson’s new book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, in the same spirit.
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Of course we loved a short story, just like everyone else, it seems. Bryson’s celebrated book was the kind of thing that today’s academic historians have a phrase for: “great history.” Just four years after a short history was published, historian Cynthia Stokes Brown published a book with a similar scope. It was called Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present. Far more than Bryson, Stokes Brown is now seen as someone with an important take on history: that human history cannot be fully understood without taking a much broader view of history in general, human and otherwise.
regardless, both authors had similar drives: to communicate science, medicine, history, geography, you name it, just so anyone could read. it is uncontroversial to note that the hallowed world of academia tends to look down on such work (the implicit argument is that something so ambitious is necessarily a work of synthesis, not research), but it is fascinating to note that for many, like me, who ended in academia, a paper like a short history may have been a pivotal push in the right direction.
The aforementioned discussion with my friend, however, was about something different: I argued that, as wonderful as a short story was, where Bryson really shined was in his less radical books. bryson’s shakespeare: the world as a stage had just opened and it was a difficult decision, but i found bryson’s idiosyncratic, even erratic detours through elizabethan england and shakespeare controversies more charming, more interesting, than a short story. /p>
then it would be only partly a function of age that can cause one to feel an acute sense of disappointment with the body. a fairly straightforward tour through organs or organ systems (a chapter on the brain, another on the skeleton, another on the gut, etc.), the body is the kind of book that makes one wonder how bryson lost its touch magic by making very large books transcend the common textbook. Often during the body, it’s unclear what exactly it is that makes Bryson feel that a living scientist’s words or two per chapter are enough to captivate the reader more than an introductory science textbook would. human biology. if anything, the way the body moves makes one wish there were subtitles and diagrams, things textbooks have. so what happened?
Perhaps most missing is Bryson’s trademark wit and witty ways of analysis. there is a bit of both. In the first chapter, Bryson takes us through a tour of the different prices that groups of scientific experts put on the human body: “Together, according to the [Royal Society of Chemistry], the total cost of building a new human being , using an attentive benedict cumberbatch as a template, would be a very precise $151,578.76.” is a promising start. In a short story, Bryson almost always used a fun frame through which to build. on the body, it’s an early trick that’s almost never tried again. wit is even rarer. this is a pity.
the reason bryson has had so many fans, like me, over the years is not because he is exceptionally good at synthesis, but because he is able to do what similar books cannot do: make the synthesis is compulsively readable. For my money, the best joke in this almost 400-page book with hardly anything is the following sentence about the Polish chemist Casimir Funk who came up with the idea of vitamins:
bryson knows full well that readers are suckers for a good pun. but the jokes are too few and far between to make a difference.
what is left to the body, then, is a strong sense of didactics and a pedestrian tone of unrelenting pomp and hyperbole so common in popular science books that aim to make anything related to scientific discovery seem amazing . There are glimmers of hope as Bryson uses wacky and riveting stories. The story of Alphonse Bertillon, a man called to the scene of a murder in a Paris apartment in 1902, is one such glimpse. Bertillon went on to deduce the fact that fingerprints are unique, which made fingerprinting a standard forensic technique; This relatively short story allows the reader to glide right into Bryson’s musings on how what evolutionary purpose unique fingerprints confer is still unknown, and right into more interesting things about the skin organ—no eureka! traps.
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But more often than not, Bryson eschews storytelling altogether: When discussing heart disease, he writes that “the triggering event for public awareness seems to have been the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt… when he died. …the world suddenly seemed to realize that heart disease had become a serious and widespread problem.” that’s all we know about fdr and this sudden transformation. where bryson could replace a blank space with an interesting story, he puts a period and just moves on to more boring topics.
The tendency to abandon fruitful threads can be infuriating. the body seems well placed to inform readers of the controversy in the history of biology. The gruesome and controversial experiments that led to insights into heart pressure are a welcome sight, as is the raging discord between the two men who shared the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering an efficient way to obtain insulin. But one can’t help but wish Bryson would get closer to the controversy. he flirts briefly with the tense ethic of what counts as “brain death” and elsewhere with the fact that, due to the economics of patents, the vast majority of modern pharmaceutical companies have stopped pursuing new antibiotics. but that’s all they are: brief flirtations. And in at least one particular case, Bryson’s aversion to sitting on controversy is truly damning. Discussing the cost of new therapies that work remarkably well for certain melanomas, Bryson quotes a professor of immunology. the professor asks: “what are we going to do… cure a few rich people and tell the others that it is not available?” And Bryson says, “But that is, of course, another matter entirely.” I really can’t remember when I was angrier by the end of a chapter. or more surprised that the humanist writer of a short story is so ignorant of the larger connections and implications of his subject.
The truth is that it is not clear who the body is for. Is it the kind of book aimed at children bored with textbooks, or is it aimed at the casual adult reader? Is it intended for people who care about and know the human body, or is it for people who know nothing about it? It’s a strange burden for a writer to expect a completely different book than the one at hand, but for many long-time Bryson fans, this may be exactly the conundrum.
And no matter who the reader is, it’s hard to imagine the body having the kind of incredible impact that a short story did, especially in an age when there are so many wonderful books with similar scope. The body does not rise to the level of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s wonderful gene, or Henry Gee’s on the other side of the bridge; your inner fish by neil shubin, or the history of the human body by daniel lieberman. the sense of the prosaic trumps the ambition of the scope, but maybe, in a sense, I’m having the same argument that I had as a teenager. I like Bryson’s less ambitious books better. Only this time, it’s not a difficult decision to make at all.
kamil ahsan is a biologist, historian, and writer based in new haven. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Angels Book Review, The American Perspective, and The Chicago Review, among other places.