[.ca] How We Live (ISBN 0679781404)

From Amazon.com:
After he won the National Book Award for How We Die, physician and popular medical writer Sherwin Nuland noticed that book critics kept referring to his next book, The Wisdom of the Body, as How We Live. Rather than fight the tide, he embraced the nickname and reissued the book. How We Live is a fascinating examination of the machinery of life. Dr. Nuland begins his meditation with a hair-raising account of a medical emergency that nearly ends in disaster: a 40-year-old woman almost bleeds to death on the operating table as he and other doctors struggle frantically to find the source of the hemorrhage. Eventually, Dr. Nuland and his team are able to locate the cause--a rare aneurysm of the splenic artery--and repair it. The patient survives. How We Live, Dr. Nuland tells us, grew out of the experiences of that night and his certainty that Marge Hanson lived because of her own will and the surgical team's will not to let her die. That "will to live" is what Dr. Nuland calls the Human Spirit, and spirit is very much a part of the body's wisdom. Each chapter of How We Live focuses on a different biological function, from the work of the lymph nodes to the process of pregnancy and birth. The heart, the nervous and digestive systems, the sex organs, and the brain are all explored and commented on with clarity and grace. But Dr. Nuland is not content with merely providing an operating manual for the body. He is in a constant state of wonder at what a miraculous and mysterious thing the body is: a dynamic system of parts all working in concert, infused with that fierce, intangible quality--the human spirit.

Do some proper wondering...:
"No matter how similar our parts to those of other animals, there are to be found within them some characteristics that make us uniquely human." (from the Introduction). The human body. We all have one. If you're reading this, you have one! What could be more interesting than finding out more about it? How it works? How it fails us at times? And "why" it does both? Well, Dr. Nuland is an expert in this field, and his book about the human body is just fantastic, I was thoroughly enthralled by it, from cover to cover. Just when the textbook-style facts verged on becoming tedious, Nuland would sensitively lace (suture?) everything together with a true-to-life surgical story that not only drove home the facts, but kept me in suspense... flipping the pages like it was a novel. One of my specialties is being critical, and yet I cannot find a bad thing to say about this book. Did you know that every time your heart beats, it is forcing blood into a network of arteries, veins, and capillaries that extend for tens of thousands of miles within your body? That's right... TENS of thousands! ...Of miles! Think about it. Did you know that if your folded-up brain were spread out, it would cover two-and-a-half square feet, and within this space are ten billion neurons and sixty trillion synapse connections? (Hey Mr. Gates... Pentium-Shmentium!) Did you know that the human skin contains 2.5 million sweat glands? Neither did I. But with this book you learn so much. Like, for instance, a sure-fire way to memorize the ten chemicals that make up the human body. But "How We Live" is not just some sort of compendium of biological facts, it is an exciting journey through real life situations that we can all relate to or at least sympathize with. Some of the case histories here are just incredible. Nuland covers everything from theories on the human spirit and the will to live, basic cell division, the reproductive act and system, the nerves and how they work, DNA and genetic structure, the heart, the digestive system, the brain, and how we think. Did it bug me that Nuland (an agnostic) is not a creationist? Sort of. I am so 100% convinced that a real "living" God designed all that Nuland talks about in this book. So it sometimes bothered me to hear him attribute so much wonderful intricacy to the specious powers of evolution/natural selection. But I greatly appreciated his comment in the final chapter, where he said that, in the final analysis, "to espouse atheism is to be unscientific." Read the book to find out what this veteran medical scientist means by that statement. Read this book to find out what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant when he said: "One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the lustre out of all fiction." Read this book and nod your head in agreement with St. Augustine, who said: "Men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the course of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering." (From Confessions, Book X, chapter 8). Read How We Live, and do some proper wondering.

Body Mechanics:
I bought this book under the title "Wisdom of the Body". Because it was written after "How We Die", which won a National Book Award, it was changed from "Wisdom of the Body" to "How We Live" because so many reviewers nicknamed it that. Dr. Nuland is one of the best writer's I have come across concerning the function of the human body. He writes with such clarity and interweaves his stories with wonderful references to the history of medicine. I think everyone that has the least bit of interest in how their body works should read his books. You don't have to have a medical background to understand his writing, but if you do have a medical background, he helps you see things even more clearly. These books are especially meaningful for anyone who has an aging parent suffering from certain illnesses. It will give you an understanding and a peace that you might not find elsewhere.

Like an adventure novel:
I enjoyed Nuland's book. For those who know a little, or a lot, about anatomy and physiology, this is an excellent read. Nuland has a passion for his work as a surgeon and a talent to make the complex understandable. His philosophical expository is punctuated with real life cases.

Heavy on science, but extremely well-written overall.:
This was the first of Nuland's books that I have read and it will definitely not be the last. I found it extremely fascinating to read, both from the perspective of the scientific and humanities aspects to medicine. He tells about the body's inner workings through unique case studies over the course of his career. The physiology is very descriptive, but not in a boring text-book type of way. The pages flow from one to the next as he explores the various aspectes that living organisms, especially humans, go through in the process of life. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in medicine or biology. There are better books that focus on only the science or personal aspect of medicine, but this is a rare and fabulously written combination of the two. Nuland's command of the English language is a joy to read and will be extremely informative and entertaining to the novice or expert reader.

An outstanding book:
Dr. Nuland has written a well constructed book that leads the reader through a bit of anatomy, together with helpful discussions of the Greek and Latin words behind the anatomical names. However, the main focus is on how the body strives to maintain health and how the emergent phenomena of 'Human Spirit' plays into that maintenance. Contrary to the impressions from earlier reviewers, I found this book to be extremely well written, and carefully constructed so that the reader is exposed to the nature of the material in a well ordered way. I loved his writing style, I loved the emotion behind the stories he told, and I appreciate his struggles with how the human spirit could emerge from the chaos of evolution. I highly recommend this book.