Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form - Hardcover

Sims, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670032247 ISBN 13: 9780670032242

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2003

Synopsis

A cultural history of the perceptions, exploitations, and celebrations of the human body discusses such topics as Achilles' heel, dreadlocks, fingerprints, breast-feeding, navel rings, and back pain. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

Are we more than the sum of our parts? Perhaps, but it's fascinating nonetheless to look at our noses, ears, feet, and other bits as isolated evolutionary stories. That's just what Michael Sims does in Adam's Navel, an amusing collection of bodily facts. Sims wrote the book while laid out recovering from back surgery, jotting free association musings about whatever body part he had in mind. The result is a set of chapters with such titles as "Skin Deep," "The Not-Quite-Naked Ape," and "Our Steed the Leg." Besides anatomy and evolution, Sims turns to literature, movies, comics, and pop culture to glean references. He doesn't have patience for puritanical or non-egalitarian attitudes toward body parts, defending Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues against a "conspiracy of silence" and dismissing Camille Paglia's "nonsensical argument" that male urination is superior to that of females. But Sims doesn't let things get too serious:

The cleft where the buttocks begin to form into two hemispheres--the butt crack famously exhibited by fat plumbers who drop wrenches--was once called the nock. The word survives elsewhere, as the name of an arrow's notch to accommodate the bowstring.

As engaging as it is fact-filled, Adam's Navel brings together delightful anatomical trivia with abundant evidence that we pay as much attention to breasts, fingers, and patches of hair as we do to whole people. --Therese Littleton

About the Author:

Michael Sims has written about science, culture, and the arts for newspapers, magazines, and radio, and has worked as a researcher and editor. He is also the author of Darwin's Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0670032247
• ISBN 13: 9780670032242
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352