The Way We Work: Getting to Know the Amazing Human Body Book

Non-Fiction. A walk through the human body, starting at the atomic level, moving on to tissues and organs, and ending with reproduction, accompanied with a variety of illustrations. The book is fun (in the appendix, there's an appendix!); the writing can be jokey and the illustrations often include ladders and tiny people commenting on the action. The artwork is colorful and detailed, frequently depicting human systems as factories or machines.

So it's playful, but there's serious science going on as well, though the level of detail varies. There were times I had too much information, and times I didn't have enough. The section on the pancreas doesn't even mention diabetes, and the pages on blood groups don't explain positive and negative types. Most of the time I'm sure I didn't even know what I was missing. In general, it's a good overview of the body's systems and the way they work, but not much attention is paid to simple things that can go wrong with those systems. I guess that's a different book.

At times the text made more sense than the diagrams or vice versa, and sometimes the text failed to explain the illustrations at all, leading me to wonder, "What am I looking at?" But when Macaulay gets it right, the illustrations work perfectly with the text to explain things with little arrows and cut-away views. The artwork is also very consistent; for example, yellow lines are nerves, and green ones denote lymph systems; this really becomes useful towards the end where you're dealing with cut-aways that are crawling with vessels and tendons and glands.

One of the best things about this book is that each pair of facing pages deals with one idea. The next pair do something else, and though each pair builds on previous information, it's in a way that doesn't require much, if any, flipping back and forth to refresh your memory.

Now, supposedly kids are the target market for this book. I first saw it in a newsletter for kids' books, and some of the libraries in my system have it cataloged as juvenile, but unless your juvenile's taken high school level chemistry and biology, they're not going to make it past the first chapter. The subsequent chapters are a little less science-intensive, but still rather complicated. The chapter on reproduction bypasses sex almost entirely, dealing instead with the mechanics of the sexual organs and conception, so if by chance your young child is a whiz at chemistry but knows nothing about sex, you'll find that section will definitely require additional explanation.

Four stars for introducing complex physical systems with humor and big goofy pictures. As a non-juvenile, I enjoyed the book. Despite its omissions, I never felt like I was being talked down to and I learned some stuff that I definitely should have already known. I must have been asleep that day in biology.