Cutter Wood

Earthly Materials (eBook, ePUB)

Journeys Through Our Bodies' Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Bill Bryson's The Body meets Mary Roach's Gulp (with a dash of What's Your Poo Telling You?) in this rollicking and delightfully educational tour of our bodily emissionsfrom mucus to sweat to pooprevealing them to be as fascinating as they are embarrassing and proving how essential they are to human health.

In biology class, we learn that the body is a fundamentally cohesive organism, a collection of organs and tissues working together to a common purpose, all overseen by the brain and wrapped up tidily in a covering of skin. But while this idea of the body isn't false, it fails to give us a complete picture in one crucial way: though the system appears tidy and self-contained on the page, in reality it is far from it. Whether it is blowing its nose, mopping sweat from its brow, or excusing itself to the restroom, the human organism is essentially porous.

Our bodies continuously shed material, and while we often think of these materials as wastes, they serve far more complex functions. The exchange, elimination, and frequent disguise of our effluence has been elemental to the development of human civilization, and our lives today are still governed by a host of laws and superstitions and social mores about the materials our bodies leave behind.

In thirteen discrete chapters, Earthly Materials tells a story about one of the materials the human body shedsfrom breath and urine to vomit and tears. Sometimes the questions examined are historical. What have we physically done with all the urine produced in our cities? Sometimes they approach the matter through a philosophical lens. Is it ever logical to cry? Sometimes they explore recent scientific discoveries. How does mucus undermine our understanding of natural selection? But they always offer a window into how we negotiate our place in the world and how we get along with one another.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: HarperCollins
• Seitenzahl: 384
• Erscheinungstermin: 29. April 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780063048614
• Artikelnr.: 64117718

Autorenporträt

Cutter Wood is the author of Love and Death in the Sunshine State. His work has appeared in Harper's, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review Daily, and other publications. He completed an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa, is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and was the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence at George Washington University. He lives in Baltimore with his partner and family.

Rezensionen

"The 5-year-old nose picker in me delighted in Cutter Woods's attention to all things gross in Earthly Materials, while my adult sensibilities reveled in his eminently-readable research of the infinitesimal miracles and machinations of the human body. A must read for popaholics, blood donors, the pee drinking community, and anyone who's ever been amazed or aghast at what just came out." - Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

"Provocative and profound. Earthly Materials takes us on a tour to the furthest and strangest corners of ourselves, the dimensions we generally prefer not to think or speak about, and in doing so teaches us something resounding and revelatory about who - and what - we are." - Brian Christian, author of The Alignment Problem and The Most Human Human

"An utterly unique tour of the human body...With a flair for storytelling, Wood pulls unexpectedly profound insights from deeply strange anecdotes." - Publishers Weekly