The Body: A Guide for Occupants

Bill Bryson's tour of the human body is full of fascinating details on how it functions, in ways both good (“Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turns cancerous and your immune system captures and kills them") and bad (“The adoption of a narrower pelvis to accommodate our new gait brought a huge amount of pain and danger to women in childbirth. Until recent times, no other animal on Earth was more likely to die in childbirth than a human, and perhaps none even now suffers as much)." Bryson remains a first-rate non-fiction writer; he takes an extraordinarily vast subject, and somehow finds just the right anecdotes to assemble a cohesive, lucid and witty narrative. The world is a better place for having Bill Bryson in it.