Review by Booklist Review
The human body expels, sheds, and excretes a variety of substances and stuff that we would mostly prefer not to think about. Topping that list is vomit, flatulence, feces, and snot. In his odd tribute to bodily "materials," Wood mulls over a dozen things the body produces, including tears, semen, menses, urine, breast milk, exhaled breath, and hair. The discussion incorporates history, culture, plenty of memoir, but, surprisingly, a relatively small amount of science. Famous figures appear, such as George Orwell (bed-wetting), Siddhartha Gautama, Jonathan Swift, and Michel de Montaigne (kidney stones). Curious facts abound. Humans have three types of tears, basal, reflex, emotional. The average healthy adult generates a gallon of mucus daily. Beards grow quickest in the month of July. Wood often wanders into lengthy accounts of peripheral topics such as his own experience ingesting the psychedelic compound ayahuasca, a woman in Florida who resells unused infant formula, an internet site for individuals trying not to masturbate, a crying professional tennis player. Decay and demise have central roles, or as Wood writes, "Little by little, we are falling apart."
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Wood (Love and Death in the Sunshine State) delivers an offbeat examination of blood, milk, semen, and other products of the human body. He delves into the biological functions of each, describing, for instance, how mucus in the gut protects bacterial diversity by providing sugars to microorganisms "in such a way that their more virulent functions are suppressed," ensuring no strain eliminates the others. Other sections focus on how secretions interact with society. For instance, he details the case of a Florida mother who was arrested on racketeering charges for illegally reselling formula sourced through a federal welfare program for low-income mothers, suggesting that the considerable demand for formula that fueled her grift stems from inhospitable workplaces that make it difficult to hold a job while breastfeeding. Elsewhere, Wood contends that individuals who solicit advice from Reddit on how to masturbate less are really seeking to feel more in control of their lives, and that disagreements over whether to exhibit human hair collected by Nazis at Auschwitz testifies to how hair is often used to represent personhood. With a flair for storytelling, Wood pulls unexpectedly profound insights from deeply strange anecdotes. The result is an utterly unique tour of the human body. Photos. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Cheerful accounts of the human organism. Like all animals, humans extract energy from their surroundings. We consume other forms of life and sometimes mix it with inorganic matter (i.e., water, oxygen), convert it into a useful product, and usually return it or its residue back into the environment. Journalist Wood, author ofLove and Death in the Sunshine State, delivers a dozen idiosyncratic essays on these physiological elements from the fundamental (blood, milk, breath, tears) to the noisome (feces, urine, vomit). When he writes as a journalist, interviews researchers, and often becomes a subject of their studies, the result is popular science (mucus, hair), history (urine--an obsession of alchemists and physicians; traditional beliefs about menses are beyond bizarre), or racial politics (blood) mixed with a sprinkling of diversionary anecdotes. In many cases, the anecdotes swamp the educational material, but readers will share the author's fascination. The milk chapter features a mother caught up in a massive scheme to sell stolen infant formula, and the one on semen mostly recounts masturbation and internet pornography. Vomit is taken up with the author's experience at a New Age religious ceremony in which participants consume a psychedelic known to cause violent emesis; Cutter is largely spared and has a wonderful time, but this is not the case with his companions. Elsewhere, he provides more than many readers will want to know about adolescent approaches to flatulence. Bill Bryson'sThe Body was the best popular work on human physiology. Mary Roach's books contain the most jokes. Wood has written perhaps the most quirky, but it's a subject with a universal appeal, so no matter how far he wanders, readers will likely follow. A highly personal examination of the highly personal. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
