Meeting place: Arco Lounge, Harborne High Street

Book: The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson

To ensure the staff at Arco Lounge are fully prepared, we’d be grateful if you could RSVP either on our events page on Facebook.

Shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2020

Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year 2020

'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.'

Bill Bryson sets off to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts and astonishing stories The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological make up.

A wonderful successor to A Short History of Nearly Everything, this new book is an instant classic. It will have you marvelling at the form you occupy, and celebrating the genius of your existence, time and time again.

'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.' 

You might want to consider these pre-meeting questions:

❓What part of the human body do you know the least about but are most curious to learn?

❓Do you prefer popular science that feels more like storytelling or more like a textbook and what are you hoping for from this book?

❓How comfortable are you with the idea of reading about the body in detail: fascinating, unsettling or a bit of both?