The Unseen Body

May 1, 2021

From world-famous neuroscientist Damasio (it all started with Descartes' Error), Feeling and Knowing relies on recent discoveries in neurobiology, psychology, and AI to explain what consciousness really is (originally scheduled for March 2021). Foster and Frylinck, creators of the documentary phenom My Octopus Teacher--one of Netflix's top 10 films of 2020--swam through South Africa's jaw-droppingly beautiful kelp forests without benefit of wetsuits or oxygen masks (but aided by their favorite octopus) to bring us Underwater Wild, illustrated with over 200 full-color photographs (100,000-copy first printing). A multi-award-winning blogger and founder of Planet Paws, Facebook's most popular pet health page, Habib joins forces with world-renowned veterinarian Becker to explain that dogs suffer from the same chronic illnesses as humans, then introduces a wealth of science-based information ensuring that The Forever Dog in your household will stay alive and well for a long time (150,000-copy first printing). In The Wires of War, Helberg, the former news policy lead at Google, limns the growing cyber conflict piting the West against primarily Russia and China over both software (e.g., news information and social media platforms) and hardware (e.g., cell phones and satellites (100,000-copy first printing). Having grown up in Bangladesh, which she describes as having minimal women's health care, Hossain expected expert maternal care in wealthy America--and nearly died in childbirth; All in Your Head is her impassioned critique of sexism in U.S. health care. Offerman humorously explores the great outdoors as he takes us where The Deer and the Antelope Play. New Yorker staffer Orlean, perhaps best known for The Orchid Thief, here writes On Animals, which explores the animal-human relationship in stories she has written throughout her career. Editor of the New York Times Book Review, Paul offers 100 never-before-published essays (with witty illustrations by Nishant Choksi) to explore 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet, from punctuation and good manners to the ability to entertain ourselves. In The Plant Hunter, enthnobotanist Quave relates her search for plants that can improve or save our lives. Having practiced medicine worldwide, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, Reisman takes us inside The Unseen Body to describe its functions by relating them to the world--the Arctic taught him the value of fat, for instance, while the Himalayas revealed the border between brain and mind (75,000-copy first printing). A prolific author of science titles, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Rhodes profiles Harvard biologist and naturalist O. Wilson--noteworthy for promoting sociobiology and biodiversity--in Scientist. In Being You, the codirector of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the Universitiy of Sussex, explains that we do not view the world objectively but through a series of constant predictions that are rooted in biological mechanisms we can now measure.

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July 26, 2021
In this ambitious if uneven debut, physician and naturalist Reisman offers a “behind-the-scenes look at life itself” via an odyssey through the human body. Accompanied by stories from his experience practicing medicine around the world—“from a clinic in high-altitude Nepal to an emergency room in Arctic Alaska”—each chapter considers a different part of human anatomy to highlight “how those parts compose a whole.” Rather than feature case studies of the sensational oddities, Reisman focuses on the more pedestrian cases that make up the bulk of his career as a generalist—such as “battling the fallout of the throat’s flawed design” in caring for a patient with pneumonia, or walking a middle-aged man through his first heart attack. A particulary striking chapter on feces sees Reisman bluntly challenges taboos surrounding human excrement with the story of a patient whose debilitating diarrhea was treated with an experimental fecal transplant. Notwithstanding the deep curiosity driving his narrative, though, Reisman often slips into clichéd musings—for instance, in an essay on genitalia, he concludes with his own child’s birth, making the trite observation that “nothing would ever be the same.” Though its author is clearly well traveled, this work mostly treads familiar territory.

September 1, 2021
A physician describes his travels and adventures while educating us about our body parts. Reisman presents 15 compelling, sometimes scattershot chapters that mix personal experiences with lessons on anatomy--e.g., organs (lungs, heart, brain), fluids (blood, mucus, feces), and regions (genitals, throat, digits)--and even readers familiar with college biology will enjoy the experience. The author provides clear explanations of how blood must circulate, food enter and move steadily from one end of the body to the other, and urine, mucus, bile, and air flow smoothly. "A physician's task in treating disease," he writes, "is to alleviate blockages and allow fluids to resume their proper motion. In other words, most of the practice of medicine is plumbing." Doctors spend much of their day dealing with a leak or "a clog stopping up the flow of some fluid sloshing through the body's corporeal pipes." The author delivers his lessons in a few pages before taking up subjects that fascinate him, a strategy that mostly works. Frostbite and finger injuries, with which Reisman has long experience, take up most of the discussion of digits, while in the chapter on blood, the author discusses leeches and how they are sometimes applied to skin grafts to prevent veins from clotting. In another chapter, Reisman chronicles the liver's role in metabolism, a patient in the terrible throes of liver failure who was saved by a transplant, and his initial disgust with his relatives' beloved chopped liver. Curious after studies in medical school, he took his first taste during Thanksgiving dinner and discovered that he liked it. This leads into a section on his global travels, many of which involved the consumption of various animal parts: kidneys, pancreases, marrow, brain, lungs, and even eyeballs. Little is known about the pineal gland in the brain except that it seems to regulate sleep, so Reisman writes about his sleep-deprived training and the miseries of the hospital routine on patients and health professionals alike. Quirky, never-dull popular science.

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October 1, 2021

Reisman, a white American internist and naturalist, takes readers on a journey through the human body, with intriguing narratives about anatomy and treating patients around the world. Each chapter focuses on one part of human anatomy (skin; the lungs), its role, and what happens when it doesn't function. Within these chapters, Reisman recounts practicing medicine outside the continental U.S. (working at an I�upiat clinic in Arctic Alaska; studying altitude-induced headaches in Nepal) and shares his discoveries about the human body and its connections to the rest of the natural world; this is where the book's greatest value lies. Reisman's passion and inquisitiveness are engaging even when topics turn to feces and cadavers, but readers should be warned about the book's detailed descriptions of invasive procedures. VERDICT An engaging book likely to pique the curiosity of readers interested in a wide range of medical conditions or naturalistic medicine.--Rich McIntyre Jr., UConn Health Sciences Lib., Farmington

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