Bill Bryson Biography

William McGuire Bryson, popularly known as Bill Bryson, is an American–British author of books on travel, the English language, science, and other non-fiction topics. Born in the United States, he has been a resident of Britain for most of his adult life, returning to the U.S. between 1995 – 2003, and holds dual American and British citizenship. 

Bryson worked as the chancellor of Durham University from 2005 – 2011. He came to the spotlight in the United Kingdom with the publication of Notes from a Small Island (1995), an exploration of Britain, and its accompanying TV series.

Bryson received widespread acknowledgment again with the publication of A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), a book widely acclaimed for its accessible communication of science.

Bill Bryson Age

Bryson is 69 years old as of 2020, he was born on December 8, 1951, in Des Moines, Iowa, the United States of America. He celebrates his birthday on December 8, every year, and his birth sign is Sagittarius. Bryson will be turning 70 years on December 8, 2021.

Bill Bryson Height

Bryson stands at an average height. He appears to be quite tall in stature if his photos, relative to his surroundings, are anything to go by. However, details regarding his actual height and other body measurements are currently not publicly available. We will update this section when the information is available.

Bill Bryson Weight

Bryson stands at an average height. He has not shared his weight with the public yet. Bryson’s weight will be listed once we get it from a trustworthy source. Known for his captivating personality, Bryson has brown eyes and the color of his hair is white.

Bill Bryson Education

Bryson is a highly educated and qualified person. He attended Drake University for two years before dropping out in 1972, deciding instead to backpack around Europe for four months. Bryson returned to Europe the following year with a high school friend, Matt Angerer. He wrote about some of his experiences from the trip in his book Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe.

Bill Bryson Family

Bill Bryson Parents and Siblings

Bryson was born and brought up in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of Bill Bryson Sr. (father), a sports journalist who worked for over five decades at the Des Moines Register, and Agnes Mary (mother), the home furnishings editor at the same newspaper. Bryson’s mother Agnes was of Irish origin. He also had an older brother, Michael who was born in 1942 but kicked the bucket in 2012, and a sister, Mary Jane Elizabeth.

Bill Bryson Wife

Bryson met his wife who was a nurse named Cynthia Billen, whom he married in 1975. They moved to Bryson’s hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, in 1975 so that Bryson could complete his college degree at Drake University. In 1977 they settled in Britain. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire, with his wife and his four children.

Bill Bryson Children

Bryson and his spouse Cynthia are both proud parents of four adorable children. He has done a very good job of maintaining his personal and professional life. He is a good husband and also a loving father. Till now no rumors about their divorce have emerged.

Bill Bryson Daughter

Bryson and his daughter Felicity: super supporters of Team Margot. Margot passed away six years ago today. She died peacefully at home, surrounded by those who love her.

Bill Bryson Net Worth

Bryson has an estimated net worth of $10 Million dollars as of 2021. This includes his assets, money, and income. His primary source of income is his career as an author. Through his various sources of income, he has been able to accumulate a good fortune but prefers to lead a modest lifestyle.

Bill Bryson Measurements and Facts

Here are some interesting facts and body measurements you should know about Bryson.

Bill Bryson Wikipedia

• Full Names: William McGuire Bryson.
• Popular As: Bill Bryson.
• Gender: Male.
• Occupation / Profession: Author.
• Nationality: American.
• Race / Ethnicity: White.
• Religion: Christian.
• Sexual Orientation: Straight.

Bill Bryson Birthday

• Age / How Old?: 69 Years Old.
• Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius.
• Date of Birth: December 8, 1951.
• Place of Birth: Des Moines, Iowa, United States of America.
• Birthday: December 8.

Bill Bryson Body Measurements

• Body Measurements: Pending Update.
• Height / How Tall?: Average.
• Weight: Moderate.
• Eye Color: Brown.
• Hair Color: White.
• Shoe Size: Pending Update.

Bill Bryson Family and Relationship

• Father (Dad): Bill Bryson Sr.
• Mother: Agnes Mary.
• Siblings (Brother and Sister): Michael & Mary Jane Elizabeth.
• Marital Status: Married.
• Wife/Spouse: Married to Cynthia Billen.
• Dating / Girlfriend: Not Applicable.
• Children: Four.

Bill Bryson Net Worth and Salary

• Net Worth: $10 Million dollars as of 2021.
• Salary: Pending Update.
• Source of Income: Writing.

Bill Bryson House and Cars

• Place of living: Hanover, New Hampshire.
• Cars: Car Brand to be Updated.

Bill Bryson Books

• The Body: A Guide for Occupants 2019
  
• A Short History of Nearly Everything 2003
  
• A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail 1997
  
• Down Under 2000
  
• At Home: A Short History of Private Life 2010
  
• Notes from a Small Island 1995
  
• The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way 1990
  
• The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island 2015
  
• One Summer: America, 1927 2013
  
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 2006
  
• Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe 1991
  
• The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America 1989
  
• Shakespeare: The World as Stage 2007
  
• Notes from a Big Country 1998
  
• Made in America 1994 Bill Bryson’s African Diary 2002
  
• Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words 1984
  
• Walkabout 1998
  
• Icons of England 2008
  
• Motel blues 1993
  
• Journeys in English 2004
  
• The Palace Under the Alps: And Over 200
  
• Other Unusual, Unspoiled, and Infrequently Visited Spots in 16 European Countries 1985
  
• African Diary: A Short Trip for a Worthy Cause 2016
  
• Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors 2008
  
• The English Landscape 2000
  
• Bizarre World 1995 The Babe Didn’t Point: And Other Stories About Iowans and Sports The Blook of Bunders 1982
  
• The Best American Travel Writing 2016
  
• Made in America Display Piece 1994
  
• Bill Bryson The Complete Notes 2000

Bill Bryson A Walk In The Woods

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail is a 1998 autobiographical book by travel writer Bill Bryson, describing his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend “Stephen Katz”.

The book is written in a humorous style, interspersed with more serious discussions of matters relating to the trial’s history, and the surrounding sociology, ecology, trees, plants, animals, and people.

Bill Bryson Short History Of Nearly Everything

One of the world’s most beloved writers and New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body takes his ultimate journey into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.

In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail well, most of it. In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand and, if possible, answer the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves.

Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, traveling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps.

He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.

Bill Bryson Home

Bill Bryson special guest on this week’s Home Delivery

American-born writer Bill Bryson came to prominence with his recollections of living in the UK Notes from a Small Island. His books include Downunder, about traveling through Australia, and A Short History of Nearly Everything.

We begin this episode at the Holloway Sanitorium, a former psychiatric hospital, where he worked while backpacking through Europe. It is where he met his future wife, then a trainee nurse, and decided to make the UK his home.

From there Julia and Bill catch a classic London Cab to the old News International newspaper offices where Bill became embroiled in the nation-changing Wapping Printers Strike.

Julia and Bill wander through the London Library and discuss the inspiration for his writing before visiting the Royal Society, the oldest national scientific institution in the world, where Bill is an honorary fellow.

Bill Bryson At Home

At Home: A Short History of Private Life is a history of domestic life written by Bill Bryson. It was published in May 2010. The book covers topics of the commerce, architecture, technology, and geography that have shaped homes into what they are today told through a series of “tours” though Bryson’s Norfolk rectory that quickly digress into the history of each particular room.

Bill Bryson Australia: Down Under

Down Under (book)

Down Under is the British title of a 2000 travelogue book about Australia written by best-selling travel writer Bill Bryson. In the United States and Canada, it was published titled In a Sunburned Country, a title taken from the famous Australian poem, “My Country”. It was also published as part of Walk About, which included Down Under and another of Bryson’s books, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, in one volume.

Bill Bryson describes his travels by railway and car throughout Australia, his conversations with people in all walks of life about the history, geography, unusual plants and animals of the country, and his wry impressions of the life, culture, and amenities (or lack thereof) in each locality.

In a style similar to his book A Walk in the Woods, or William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Bryson’s research enabled him to include many stories about Australia’s 19th-century explorers and settlers who suffered extreme deprivations, as well as details about its natural resources, culture, and economy. His writings are intertwined with recurring humorous themes.

Bill Bryson One Summer America 1927

One Summer: America, 1927 is a 2013 history book by Bill Bryson. The book is a history of the summer of 1927 in the United States. It was published in October 2013 by Doubleday. The book focuses on various key events of that summer as lenses through which to view American life: what it had recently been and what it was becoming.

The events covered include the nonstop transatlantic flight of Charles Lindbergh; the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927; the unusual season played by Babe Ruth and the rest of the 1927 New York Yankees; the transition from the Ford Model T to the new Model A; the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti; the presidency of Calvin Coolidge; and the advent of the talking-picture era with the release of The Jazz Singer.

One of the themes explored is the contrast between the Roaring Twenties of the time and the looming Great Depression. For example, the rapid rise and equally rapid fall of the business empire of the Van Sweringen brothers are discussed, with its glimpses of future suburbia (at Shaker Heights, Ohio) and future shopping malls (at Union Terminal), as well as the brothers’ eventual death in poverty.

Also briefly discussed is the rise and fall of Charles Ponzi’s postal coupon business, the original Ponzi scheme. The primary focus of the book, however, is on daily life, and popular cultures during that summer, such as daredevil flying, the party life of sports stars, the habits of eccentric geniuses, and what people did during hot times when air conditioning was unknown except as a scarce luxury at a few theaters and hotels.

The focus on a particular moment in history as a means to explore the wider world parallels Bryson’s previous book, 2010’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which used a particular place on Earth (a parson’s house in England) as a home base from which to explore a broader subject. Both books note a singular coalescence of coincidences or turning points in a particular year (At Home, 1851; One Summer, 1927).

These location-centered and timepoint-centered approaches offer a contrast to 2003’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, which used a diametrically opposite approach, sweeping widely across time, distance, and scale. All of the books share the common theme that they help the reader to understand life and the universe as integrated wholes and yet simultaneously as variegated collections of details.

Bryson does not address himself solely to American readers. For example, Babe Ruth and baseball are a major topic of the book, and Bryson gives useful explanations of this American game and its terminology.

Bill Bryson Mother Tongue

The Mother Tongue is a book by Bill Bryson which compiles the history and origins of the English language and its various quirks. It is subtitled English And How It Got That Way.

The book discusses the Indo-European origins of English, the growing status of English as a global language, the complex etymology of English words, the dialects of English, spelling reform, prescriptive grammar, and more minor topics including swearing. This account popularises the subject and makes it accessible to the lay reader, but it has been criticized for some inaccuracies, such as the perpetuation of several urban myths.

Bill Bryson New Book: The Body

The Body: A Guide for Occupants

Bill Bryson once again proves himself to be an incomparable companion as he guides us through the human body–how it functions, its remarkable ability to heal itself, and (unfortunately) the ways it can fail.

Full of extraordinary facts (your body made a million red blood cells since you started reading this) and irresistible Bryson-Esque anecdotes, The Body will lead you to a deeper understanding of the miracle that is life in general and you in particular.

As Bill Bryson writes, “We pass our existence within this wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted.” The Body will cure that indifference with generous doses of wondrous, compulsively readable facts and information.

Bill Bryson Shakespeare

Shakespeare: The World as Stage is a biography of William Shakespeare by author Bill Bryson. The 199-page book is part of Harper Collins’ series of biographies, “Eminent Lives”.

The focus of the book is to state what little is known conclusively about Shakespeare, and how this information is known, with some discussion of disproved theories, myths, and that which is believed by the public but not provable. It also explores the political, social, cultural, and economic background of Shakespeare’s work.

Bill Bryson Made In America: A Short History

Made In America is a nonfiction book by Bill Bryson describing the history of the English language in the United States and the evolution of American culture.

Bill Bryson In A Sunburned Country

Every time Bill Bryson walks out the door, memorable travel literature threatens to break out. His previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail resulted in the sublime national bestseller A Walk in the Woods.

In A Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely different place: Australia, the country that doubles as a continent, and a place with the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest, driest weather, and the most peculiar and lethal wildlife to be found on the planet. The result is a deliciously funny, fact-filled, and adventurous performance by a writer who combines humor, wonder, and unflagging curiosity.

Despite the fact that Australia harbors more things that can kill you in extremely nasty ways than anywhere else, including sharks, crocodiles, snakes, even riptides, and deserts, Bill Bryson adores the place, and he takes his readers on a rollicking ride far beyond that beaten tourist path.

Wherever he goes he finds Australians who are cheerful, extroverted, and unfailingly obliging, and these beaming products of land with clean, safe cities, cold beer, and constant sunshine fill the pages of this wonderful book. Australia is an immense and fortunate land, and it has found in Bill Bryson its perfect guide.

Bill Bryson The Lost Continent

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America is a book by travel writer Bill Bryson, chronicling his 13,978 mile trip around the United States in the autumn of 1987 and spring 1988. It was Bryson’s first travel book.

He begins his journey, made almost entirely by car, in his childhood hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, heading from there towards the Mississippi River, often reminiscing about his childhood in Iowa. The journey was made after his father’s death, and so is in part a collection of memories of his father in Des Moines while he was growing up.

The book is split into two sections: ‘East’ and ‘West’, the former part being considerably longer than the latter. These sections correspond to two separate journeys made in the autumn of 1987 and the spring of 1988. The first section covers the Midwest, the Deep South, the East Coast, and New England, before returning to Des Moines. The second section focuses on the Great Plains, the South West, California, and the Rocky Mountains.

Bryson’s goal in this trip was generally to avoid tourist destinations, instead choosing to experience the real every-day America, stopping at small towns and forgotten points of interest. This book is an overview of the United States from Bryson’s point of view. There is less focus on factual insight into the history, geography, and culture of the destinations in this book than is found in some of Bryson’s later books, focusing instead on observations made with the intention of being humorous.

Bill Bryson Quotes: Walk In The Woods Quotes

• I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.
• There are only three things that can kill a farmer: lightning, rolling over in a tractor, and old age.
• More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, tries to.
• We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
• I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted – stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.
• The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two percent of the world’s population.

Who Should Read Bill Bryson’s ‘The Body’?

Published in October 2019

Can an author who doesn’t live in the U.S. still be called a national treasure? Notwithstanding the tricky geographic challenge of Bryson having resided in England since 2003, that appellation surely fits Bill Bryson.

Reading a Bryson book is always a pleasure. In the case of The Body and some other Bryson books (but not all), the author narrates his own text. Hearing Bryson read his work aloud is truly a delight.

Each time I read a Bill Bryson book, I smile to think that for some years of his life (1995 to 2003) in the college town that I now work and reside. We missed each other by three years, which makes me sad, as I would have taken Bryson to Lou’s for breakfast to talk about his books. The fact that Bryson chose to live in Hanover, N.H., without any affiliation to the town’s small local college, speaks highly about the quality of life on offer in small college towns.

The Body is typical Bryson, in that the book is jam-packed with ideas and facts, and trivia. Recent Bryson books, most notably The Body, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and At Home: A Short History of Private Life, read something like facts set to music. The amount of data that Bryson can cram into his books is impressive, made more so by the fact that his books are not especially concise. The Body comes in at 464 pages, or 14 hours and four minutes.

While reading The Body (switching between my eyes and my ears), I did feel as if I was getting very smart indeed. Bryson finds something that is counterintuitively fascinating about every bodily system, organ, and process. He not only explains how the body works, but what can go wrong and why.

The challenge in reading The Body lies less with the author, but the reader. You will get much more out of The Body if you come to read the book with greater anatomical and medical knowledge than a sociologist.

While reading The Body, I tried to make a point of stopping and sharing whatever surprising medical tidbit or fact that Bryson was sharing with my medical doctor’s wife. What was big news to me (can you explain what the pancreas really does, or how the heart actually works), was super obvious to her. The irony is that as an academic physician, my wife lacks the time to read The Body, although she would likely get far more out of the book in terms of retention than I did.

Where The Body should be liberally handed out is among medical students. I have no idea if there is a tradition to hand out books the summer before first-year med students arrive on campus. If that tradition exists, The Body would be an excellent selection.

The sections of The Body where I did retain the information presented were on the failings of the U.S. health-care system. We might know how little we get for how much we spend in the U.S. on health care, but reading about how badly we fare in outcomes such as maternal and childhood mortality is genuinely depressing.

Bill Bryson Neither Here Nor There

Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe

Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe is a 1991 humorous travelogue by American writer Bill Bryson. It documents the author’s tour of Europe in 1990, with many flashbacks to two summer tours he made in 1972 and 1973 in his college days.

Parts featuring his 1973 tour focus to a large extent on the pseudonymous “Stephen Katz”, who accompanied Bryson, and who would play a more prominent role in Bryson’s later book A Walk in the Woods, as well as appearing in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

Bryson’s trip begins in the winter, in Hammerfest, Norway, where his goal is to see the Northern Lights. He visits numerous locations throughout Europe, commenting on the various aspects of life in different parts of Europe, and comparing them to how he experienced them in his earlier visits. The book ends with Bryson reaching Istanbul, Turkey, and contemplating on how the city is the gateway to Asia, and considers continuing his tour.

Unlike Bryson’s later books, Neither Here nor There is marked by his solo observations; he does not seem to engage locals in conversation in his travels, nor is there as much detailed research about the history, flora, and fauna of the places visited.

Bill Bryson Notes From A Small Island

Notes from a Small Island is a humorous travel book on Great Britain by American author Bill Bryson, first published in 1995. He wrote Notes from a Small Island when he decided to move back to his native United States, but wanted to take one final trip around Great Britain, which had been his home for over twenty years.

Bryson covers all corners of the island, observing and talking to people from as far afield as Exeter in the West Country to John o’ Groats at the north-eastern tip of Scotland’s mainland. During this trip, he insisted on using only public transport but failed on two occasions: in Oxfordshire and on the journey to John o’ Groats he had to rent a car. He also re-visits Virginia Water where he worked at the Holloway Sanatorium when he first came to Britain in 1973. (He met his future wife while employed at Holloway.)

On his way, Bryson provides historical information on the places he visits, and expresses amazement at the heritage in Britain, stating that there were 445,000 listed historical buildings, 12,000 medieval churches, 1,500,000 acres (610,000 ha) of common land, 120,000 miles (190,000 km) of footpaths and public rights-of-way, 600,000 known sites of archaeological interest and that in his Yorkshire village at that time, there were more 17th century buildings than in the whole of North America.

Bryson also pays homage to the humble self-effacing fortitude of British people under trying times, such as the world wars and Great Depression, as well as the various peculiarities of Britain and British English (such as not understanding, on his first arrival, what a counterpane was, and assuming it was something to do with a window.

It is a British English word that means quilt.) Bryson also recalls first going into an English tobacconist’s and hearing the man in front of him ask for “Twenty Number 6”, and assuming that everything in Britain was ordered by number. (A popular brand at the time was Players No. 6, and in British English, it is usual to ask for ‘twenty’ (cigarettes), meaning a packet, not twenty of them.)

Bill Bryson Movie

A Walk in the Woods (film)

A Walk in the Woods is a 2015 American biographical comedy-drama film directed by Ken Kwapis and starring Robert Redford, Nick Nolte, and Emma Thompson. Based on the 1998 book/memoir of the same name by Bill Bryson, it was released on September 2, 2015, by Broad Green Pictures.

Bill Bryson Tour

Recent books have included; At home: A Short History of Private Life, One Summer: America 1927, and The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island. Bill Bryson’s latest book; ‘The Body; A Guide for Occupants’ will be released on the 3rd of October 2019.

Tour Schedule

DATE                              CITY                     VENUE

Tuesday, 3 September – Perth PCEC – Riverside Theatre
Thursday, 5 September  – Melbourne –  Palais Theatre
Friday, 6 September –  Sydney ICC – Darling – Harbour Theatre
Wednesday, 11 September – Brisbane BCEC – Great Hall
Saturday, 14 September – Auckland – ASB Theatre
Saturday, 5 October –  Manchester The Palace – Theatre Manchester
Saturday, 12 October – Oxford  – The New Theatre Oxford

Bill Bryson To the heart of the human matter

Bryson had produced eight travel books and three about the English language before diversifying to pen “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, published in 2003.

With this, the best-selling author with a well-stamped passport but a minimal background in science produced what went on to be the biggest-selling non-fiction book of the decade in the UK, winning the Royal Society’s Aventis Prize for science books in 2004 and the Descartes Prize, the European Union’s highest literary award, in 2005.

“A Short History of Nearly Everything” traces the history of Earth, humankind, and the universe from the Big Bang to the present day, and Bryson’s trademark mixture of personable familiarity and pleasant wit succeeded in opening up this specialist world to Everyman in a way that was equally accessible and revealing.

His travel books include “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America”, “Down Under” about that quirky place Australia, “A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail”, “Bill Bryson’s African Diary” and “Notes from a Small Island”, which is a national poll has voted the book that best represents Britain, where the American has chosen to live for much of his adult life.

He has also written a biography of the shadowy Shakespeare, a couple of history books in “At Home: A Short History of Private Life” and “One Summer: America, 1927”, and a memoir about his own childhood following his birth in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951 titled “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid”.

Now, like a skilled surgeon, or a vivisectionist, Bryson has produced a second staunchly scientific book, “The Body. A Guide for Occupants”, carving up the corpus into its various components: the skin and hair, brain, head, mouth, and throat, heart and blood, skeleton, nerves and pain, lungs and breathing, guts, immune system, the nether regions, etcetera.

Four years in the making, the book draws on dozens of experts and contains almost 30 pages listing the sources Bryson used and a 12-page bibliography of some 220 books that provided valuable research. He explains: “We spend our whole lives in one body and yet most of us have practically no idea how it works and what goes on inside it.

The idea of the book is simply to try to understand the extraordinary contraption that is us. What I learned is that we are infinitely more complex and wondrous, and often more mysterious, than I had ever suspected. There really is no story more amazing than the story of us.”

We pass our experience within this warm wobble of flesh and yet take it almost for granted, Bryson says. How many among us know roughly where the spleen is or what it does? Or the difference between tendons and ligaments? Or what our lymph nodes are up to? How many times a day do you suppose you blink? Well, it’s 14,000, so many that your eyes are shut for a total of 23 minutes every waking day.

Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch from London to Moscow. The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around the Earth. Fifty-nine elements are needed to construct a human being. Six of them – carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorous – account for 99.1 percent of what makes us.

The body, Bryson tells us, is “a universe of mystery”. A very large part of what happens on and within it happens for reasons that we don’t know very often, no doubt because there are no reasons, he says. For instance, in describing the workings of the eye, the cornea “as with almost every part of the body, it is a wonder of complexity”.

Tears come in three varieties: basal (for lubrication), reflex (against irritation such as smoke or onions), and emotional we are the only creatures that cry from feeling, as far as we can tell, though why we do so is another of life’s many puzzles.

Bryson gives us the history of fingerprints, antiseptic surgery, the development of insulin, penicillin, and intrauterine devices, and of open-heart surgery, lobotomies, and kidney transplants. He weaves in stories of the astonishing characters who have been figuring out humans.

For instance, in the 1930s John H. Gibson sought to oxygenate blood to make open-heart surgery possible. “To test the capacity of blood vessels deep within the body to dilate or constrict, Gibbon stuck a thermometer up his rectum, swallowed a stomach tube. And then had icy water poured down it to determine its effect on his internal body temperature.”

There are myriad examples of medicine gone wrong. United States Founding Father and esteemed surgeon Benjamin Rush, during a yellow fever epidemic, “bled hundreds of victims and was convinced that he had saved a great many when in fact all he did was fail to kill them all. Part of the problem”, Bryson explains, “was that he believed that the body contains about twice as much blood as it actually does and that one can remove up to 80% of that notional amount without ill effect”.

The reader is carried from outside to inside from up to down and from miraculous operational efficiencies to malignant mayhem when things go awry. Cancer, as one expert opines, “is the price we pay for evolution. If our cells couldn’t mutate, we would never get cancer, but we also couldn’t evolve”. There are more than 200 cancers, and age is usually a major factor, with an 80-year-old 1000 times as likely as a teenager to get it.

The brain holds “200 exabytes of information, roughly equal to the entire digital content of today’s world”. The heart beats some 3.5 billion times in a lifetime. The bones are “stronger than reinforced concrete, yet light enough to allow us to sprint”. The lungs process 4000 gallons of air a day.

“You are pretty seriously perforated with two to five million hair follicles and perhaps twice that number of sweat glands.” And you are “exquisitely fine-tuned” with nerve receptors to detect movement of 0.00001 millimeters.

You grow 25 feet (7.66 meters) of hair in a lifetime. You host 40,000 species of microbes and when you kiss you transfer some 1 billion bacteria to your beloved, an action thought to be helpful in sampling the partner’s histocompatibility genes involved in the immune response.

In a lifetime you eat 60 tonnes of food, extracting the nutritional necessities and then producing seven tonnes of you-know-what. We produce enough flatulence that before laparoscopic insertion of carbon dioxide became the norm, patients undergoing anal surgery sometimes literally exploded.

And so on and so on. Men, apparently, don’t think about sex every seven seconds but about 19 times a day, about the same rate as thinking about food. Sex acts average about nine minutes (“in Britain at least”) and men burn 100 calories during such an encounter, women 70. Older people have an increased risk of heart attack for three hours after coitus, though the risk “was similarly raised for shoveling snow, and sex is more fun than shoveling snow”.

Thus the brainy Bryson balancing act, presenting the finer points of flesh and bones but in a readable and diverting manner for the layman. And, at 386 pages with illustrations, the book doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Frequently Asked Questions About Bill Bryson

Who is Bill Bryson?

Bryson is an American–British author of books on travel, the English language, science, and other non-fiction topics. Born in the United States, he has been a resident of Britain for most of his adult life, returning to the U.S. between 1995 – 2003, and holds dual American and British citizenship.

How old is Bill Bryson?

Bryson is an American national born on December 8, 1951, in Des Moines, Iowa, the United States of America.

How tall is Bill Bryson?

Bryson stands at an average height, he has not shared his height with the public. His height will be listed once we have it from a credible source.

Is Bill Bryson married?

Yes, Bryson is married to Cynthia Billen. They got married in 1975 and together they have four children. The couple resides in Hanover, New Hampshire together with their children.

How much is Bill Bryson worth?

Bryson has a net worth of $10 Million dollars as of 2021. This amount has been accrued from his leading roles in the writing industry.

How much does Bill Bryson make?

According to our reliable sources, Bryson’s annual salary is currently under review. Nevertheless, we are keeping tabs and will update you once this information is available.

Where does Bill Bryson live?

Bryson is a resident of Hanover, New Hampshire, we shall upload pictures of his house as soon as we have them.

Is Bill Bryson dead or alive?

Bryson is alive and in good health. There have been no reports of him being sick or having any health-related issues.

Where is Bill Bryson Now?

Bryson is still an active participant in the writing industry. He is the author of books on travel, the English language, science, and other non-fiction topics.

Bill Bryson Social Media Contacts

• Instagram
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Youtube
• Tiktok: Pending Update.
• Website: Pending Update.