The Human Body: A Basic Guide to the Way You Fit Together (Wooden Books)

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful and beautiful book
Review: This is the most beautiful book I have yet seen on the Human Body, and it's tiny! It was reviewed as follows in THE LANCET, the top British medical journal, in Aug 04: "The renaissance of anatomy heralded by Vesalius in 1543, and the physiological discoveries of the ensuing centuries, "has exploded us into innumerable bits, mostly studied in dead humans or half-dead furry mammals, a far cry from a whole". So writes Moff Betts, a Welsh doctor, in the first of nearly 30 short and witty passages accompanied by beautiful woodcuts in this pocket-sized gift book. Descriptions of DNA, the cell, embryology, and the heart are curi-ously interspersed with the ancient humours, the odd numerology of bodily proportions, and eastern systems of chakras and kundalini. Betts fosters a sense of overall connectedness despite chasms of scale and religion. I felt I was reading a distillation of ancient alchemical tomes, a 19th-century Matt Ridley, or perhaps even Paracelsus for Dummies, and while the text is beguilingly simple, it is neither dumbed down nor stripped of scientific vocabulary.The descriptions are rich and artful, and typically within a stone's throw of modern scientific understanding. An example: "the thymus shrinks after your first birthday, and by dotage it has all but been replaced by fat cells. So as the years roll by, the school of discrimination between self and nonself gradually fades, a thymic idea of what one life is." If some chapters reach too far into cleverness, or fail to escape the necessary triteness of explaining molecular biology in a page, these sins are forgivable. Betts delights in connections between the molecular and the cosmic, conveying a sense of mystery and a love of his subject. One chapter ends: "the cockles of your heart are warmth-sensitive organelles whose anatomical location has yet to be discovered." Feel your chest as you finish reading this book-there they are.