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Humans

Bill Bryson's new book celebrates the miraculous human body

Forget disease and frailty. Bill Bryson’s new book, The Body: A guide for occupants, is a hymn to the way the things inside us just work without us telling them to

By Joshua Howgego

25 September 2019

 

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The Body: A guide for occupants

Bill Bryson

Doubleday

US-BORN Bill Bryson has now spent more than half his life living in England, everywhere from Kirkby Malham in North Yorkshire to Wramplingham in Norfolk.

That non-standard relationship to the UK gave him the edge to write Notes from a Small Island, a wry account of getting to grips with Britain’s strange customs. The book made him a household name in the late 1990s. Other books followed, all using the same formula: Bryson pokes fun at himself while discovering some new and interesting place.

Then, in 2003, a surprise: he published…

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