Anatomies
Hugh Aldersley-Williams
  • Published: 20 March 2013
  • ISBN: 9780670920754
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Anatomies

The Human Body, Its Parts and the Stories They Tell

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From the author of Sunday Times bestseller Periodic Tales, a splendidly entertaining journey through the art, science, literature and history of the human body

It is the most fraught and fascinating, talked-about and taboo, unique yet universal aspect of our lives.

Until we fall ill, most of us take this extraordinarily complicated collection of flesh, bones and fluids entirely for granted. But from ancient body art to plastic surgery, from early anatomists to conceptual artists, grave-robbers to bionic athletes, our changing attitudes to the human body - how it works, what it should look like, how to live with it, what it means - tell us more about ourselves than almost any other subject in human history.

Blending history, science, art, literature and the everyday, one of our finest science writers investigates this most marvellous and mysterious of creations. The result is a treasure trove of surprising facts, remarkable stories and startling information that encompasses everything from the first finger-printing to the physiology of angels, from synaesthesia to the clown-egg register, from the death-mask of Isaac Newton to the afterlife of Einstein's brain.
  • Published: 20 March 2013
  • ISBN: 9780670920754
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320
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About the author

Hugh Aldersley-Williams

Hugh Aldersey-Williams is a writer and curator with interests ranging from science to architecture and design. His prolific career as a freelance journalist included a five-year stint as the design critic of the New Statesman.
He has written a number of books on design, as well as The Most Beautiful Molecule (1994), the story of the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of buckminsterfullerene, a molecular form of the element carbon.
More recently, he is the author of Findings: Hidden Stories in First-Hand Accounts of Scientific Discovery, and the curator of two exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Zoomorphic: New Animal Architecture and Touch Me: Design and Sensation.
He lives in Norfolk with his wife, son and two Maine coon cats.

Also by Hugh Aldersley-Williams

Periodic Tales
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Praise for Anatomies

Magnificent, inspired. He writes like a latter-day Montaigne. Stimulating scientific hypotheses, bold philosophic theories, illuminating quotations and curious facts. I recommend it to all

Telegraph *****

Splendid, highly entertaining, chock-full of insights ... It inserts fascinating scientific snippets and anecdotes about our organs into the wider history of our changing understanding of our bodies

Sunday Times

A relentlessly entertaining cultural history of the human body ... brims with fascinating details, infectious enthusiasm ... the terrain he covers is so richly brought to life

Guardian

Elegant and informative ... For Aldersey-Williams, [the body] is a thing of wonder and a repository of fascinating facts

Mail on Sunday ****
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