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Title details for The Unseen Body by Jonathan Reisman, M.D. - Wait list

The Unseen Body

A Doctor's Journey Through the Hidden Wonders of Human Anatomy

by Jonathan Reisman, M.D.
Robert Petkoff
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"Petkoff gives a flawless performance of this doctor/naturalist's memoir, conveying both his inquisitiveness and assuredness with aplomb." - AudioFile
"A fascinating, lyrical book... Reisman's experiences in other cultures bring a richness and depth to The Unseen Body. The way he thinks about the body and medicine—the rivers and tributaries, the flowing and unclogging, the top-down organization of the brain—is extraordinary!"
—Mary Roach
In this fascinating journey through the human body and across the globe, Dr. Reisman weaves together stories about our insides with a unique perspective on life, culture, and the natural world.
Jonathan Reisman, M.D.—a physician, adventure traveler and naturalist—brings listeners on an odyssey navigating our insides like an explorer discovering a new world with The Unseen Body. With unique insight, Reisman shows us how understanding mountain watersheds helps to diagnose heart attacks, how the body is made mostly of mucus, not water, and how urine carries within it a tale of humanity's origins.
Through his offbeat adventures in healthcare and travel, Reisman discovers new perspectives on the body: a trip to the Alaskan Arctic reveals that fat is not the enemy, but the hero; a stint in the Himalayas uncovers the boundary where the brain ends and the mind begins; and eating a sheep's head in Iceland offers a lesson in empathy. By relating rich experiences in far-flung lands and among unique cultures back to the body's inner workings, he shows how our organs live inextricably intertwined lives—an internal ecosystem reflecting the natural world around us.
Reisman offers a new and deeply moving perspective, and helps us make sense of our bodies and how they work in a way listeners have never before imagined.
A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 9, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781250818676
      • File size: 240793 KB
      • Duration: 08:21:39

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Robert Petkoff's voice is the perfect conduit for this engaging mix of medicine and travel. In each chapter, physician Jonathan Reisman discusses a key part of the body. Petkoff's even-keeled tone takes us on the author's tour of anatomy--through the vagaries of mucus, into the black box of the brain, and past the fragility of fingers and toes, among other journeys. His delivery smoothly blends the physiology with Reisman's travel stories, which include sampling blubber in Alaska, consuming lungs in Jaffa, and flirting with frostbite in Russia. Petkoff gives a flawless performance of this doctor/naturalist's memoir, conveying both his inquisitiveness and assuredness with aplomb. E.S.B. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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