Alive: Our Bodies and the Richness and Brevity of Existence

Surgeon Weston (Dirty Work) takes readers on an engrossing tour of the human body. Surveying how organs function, Weston explains that the lungs, for instance, push air down passageways that “terminate in grape-like clusters called alveoli,” where oxygen crosses the “gossamer-thin” barrier between the airway and surrounding capillaries that then transport the oxygenated blood to the heart. Walkthroughs of common surgical interventions are as gripping as they are grisly, as when Weston details how harvesting a heart requires quickly draining the body by making “long slashes in the biggest veins,” dumping “fish-market quantities of ice into the cavern of chest and abdomen,” and moving the heart to an apparatus that pumps blood through it until it’s time for transplantation. Weston shatters common misconceptions, as when she explains that sex isn’t solely determined by whether one has a Y chromosome. For example, people with congenital androgen insensitivity syndrome possess X and Y chromosomes but have “female” external genitalia because their bodies process male hormones atypically. Weston’s evocative descriptions will change how readers see the body (in a particularly unsettling passage, she recounts “beholding a surgeon opening a patient’s face as easily as if it were a book, to remove a large tumour”) and the anatomical trivia illuminates the astounding complexity of ordinary bodily functions. This captivates. (Mar.)