Your parents were right: Don’t bolt your food.

He writes, “Anton-Babinski syndrome, for instance, is a condition in which people are blind but refuse to believe it.” Or take this one: Americans are five times more likely to choke to death while eating than Britons. This book is full of such arresting factoids and, like a douser hunting water, Bryson is adept at finding the bizarre and the arcane in his subject matter. Humans have only one liver, but remove two thirds of it, and it will grow back, regenerating like the tail of a lizard. Scientists know much more than they once did about many things, from our tiny microbes and red blood cells (the body produces a million every second) to the brain and the heart the last dispenses about 70 gallons of blood per hour every hour one lives. Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke Paperback 1 Jun. The author does interview a New Zealand academic who discovered that people who grew up with a cat in the house “seemed to derive lifelong protection from asthma.” Of that last affliction, the author writes in an oft-repeated Byronic observation: “o one knows much of anything.” Remarkably, no one has figured out why we sleep or have allergies or suffer from asthma, among myriad other biological mysteries. More: Ali Wong talks parenthood, gets vulnerable before release of uproariously funny book, 'Dear Girls' If there is an “Intelligent Designer,” She needs to get to work on the Body Human 2.0. We can do just fine without them (or that surplus kidney). Among the unknowns are why we have earlobes, tonsils, unique whorls at the end of our digits that leave fingerprints, a gallbladder, an appendix and a uvula. He ably dissects the knowns and unknowns of how we live and die and all the idiosyncrasies of our shared infrastructure. Like an adventurer trekking the Appalachian Trail from beginning to end (as this bestselling author did for “A Walk in the Woods”), Bryson launches himself into the wilderness of the human anatomy armed with his characteristic thoroughness and wit.

Things got worse since we last spoke