Bill Bryson's 'The Body' Is Missing His Characteristic Wit, Ingenious Way Of Analysis
When I was a teenager, I had an argument with a close friend about Bill Bryson.
Both of us were competitive debaters, which meant we actively sought out sweeping, magisterial works like A Short History of Nearly Everything — something from which we could glean as much as possible from as little as possible. It's easy to imagine precocious teenagers reading Bryson's new book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, in much the same spirit.
Of course we loved as did everybody else, it seems. Bryson's celebrated book was the sort of thing academic historians today have a phrase for: "big history." Just four years after was published, the historian Cynthia Stokes Brown released a book with a similar scope. It was called . Far more than Bryson, Stokes Brown is now seen as somebody with an important approach to history:
