Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: If Our Bodies Could Talk
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1982
WEBSITE: http://www.jameshamblin.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.jameshamblin.com/info * http://www.politico.com/media/story/2014/10/the-young-doctor-002918 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hamblin_(journalist)
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1982.
EDUCATION:Indiana University, medical degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, blogger, and lecturer. University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center, radiologist; Atlantic, senior editor, 2012-.
AWARDS:Yale University Poynter Fellow in journalism, 2015.
WRITINGS
Contributor of news stories to various news outlets, including New York Times, Politico, Bon Appétit, Guardian, Elle, Mother Jones, Washington Post, Comedy Central, NPR, BBC, MSNBC, Los Angeles Times, Marketplace, New York, and Awl.
SIDELIGHTS
James Hamblin is a medical doctor who is also a writer, editor, and blogger. He graduated from Indiana University’s medical school and worked as a radiologist at University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center, then turned to writing. He became a senior editor at Atlantic magazine where he worked on a health column, was a 2015 Yale University Poynter Fellow in journalism, and hosts the video series If Our Bodies Could Talk. With his youthful looks, he has been compared to television character Doogie Howser. Hamblin talks about health and the human body and has lectured at Harvard Medical School, Wharton Business School, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and SXSW. In 2016, he was the moderator at the launch of the White House Precision Medicine Initiative where he interviewed President Barack Obama. Time has named him among the 140 people to follow on Twitter. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
In 2016, Hamblin published If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining A Human Body, based on his series of videos for Atlantic. His video series, which offers information on subjects like CrossFit vs. yoga and eating lunch at your office desk, has garnered a respectable Internet following and made him a finalist for the Best Web Personality Webby award in 2015. With numerous illustrations by Hallie Bateman, the book discusses similar topics. In funny prose but with knowledge from his medical training, Hamblin describes the functions of the human body and effects on it, such as the immune system, cancer, sleep, cosmetic surgery, vitamins, and death. He dispels popular myths, describes human anatomy and physiology, and puts difficult medical subject material into easy to understand language. He also addressed modern medical breakthroughs and treatments.
With numerous topics covering most functions of the body, Hamblin discusses such things as digestion, appearance, genetic traits, the Adam’s apple, sports drinks and vitamin water, gender transitioning, alcohol, and heart disease. Generally, Hamblin answers questions and dispels myths about health and healthcare. He starts by noting that ignorance and health claims are the most serious health problems facing people today. There is too much marketing hype not grounded in scientific fact, while politics, money, and corporate interests have adversely influenced health policy. In Library Journal, Barbara Bibel commented: “This excellent book cuts through media hype and bias to give readers useful information about their bodies.” According to Tony Miksanek in Booklist, “He writes with sarcasm, humor, and a sense of astonishment.” Miksanek also called the book educational and a bit eccentric.
According to Lisa Chase online at Elle, “He’s an engaging writer, and his is a curious mind, asking what feels like a million questions.” Hamblin answers questions on whether you can boost your immune system, why men have nipples, can cellphones cause cancer, do probiotics work, how dangerous are tight pants, will caffeine make you live longer, and how much sleep do you need? He also offers fun, and sometimes disturbing, facts, like the average person manufactures 1.5 liters of saliva each day. Chase noted that the book “does not set out to be comprehensive, and yet it feels holistically so—a testament to Hamblin’s intelligence and humor.”
When asked about the tradition of writer-doctors, like Atul Gawande, Hamblin said to Agatha French in Los Angeles Times, “They write in a very traditional way that I hope to differ from enough to reach different audiences. This [book] is a lighter gloss.” Commenting on doctors in popular media, such as Dr. Mehmet Oz, Hamblin said in an interview with Nicole Levy in Politico: “If you try to exaggerate things or oversimplify or sensationalize in any way, it develops this bad taste in people’s mouths…There’s totally a way to report on some fringe study of 16 people, but it’s got to be, like, light and fun and bring some interesting analysis to it other than, ‘Be scared, or change your habit.’ More like, ‘This is an interesting thing to think about and here’s why.’” Levy commented on Hamblin’s original video series: “Hamblin’s videos are brief, too, but always personable. The information they deliver about the health effects of drinking wine, exercising at work, and socializing is intended to entertain, rather than advise.”
In Publishers Weekly, a reviewer said: “This book will be a useful tool for helping people get in touch with their own bodies.” Dwight Garner commented in New York Times that the book “is a numbingly upbeat grab bag of anecdotes and factoids and curiosities with no through-narrative.” However, “Someone has told Mr. Hamblin that he’s funny—there’s an attempt at a joke in almost every other paragraph—but he isn’t actually so, at least not on the page. You recognize his jokes as ‘humor,’ but they don’t make you smile … Over the course of a long book these pokes in the ribs are monstrously wearing,” Garner added.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 1, 2016, Tony Miksanek, review of If Our Bodies Could Talk, p. 6.
Library Journal, January 1, 2017, Barbara Bibel, review of If Our Bodies Could Talk, p. 118.
New York Times, December 23, 2016, Dwight Garner, review of If Our Bodies Could Talk, p. C17(L).
Publishers Weekly, October 17, 2016, review of If Our Bodies Could Talk, p. 64.
ONLINE
Elle, http://www.elle.com/ (December 6, 2016), Lisa Chase, review of If Our Bodies Could Talk.
James Hamblin Website, http://www.jameshamblin.com (August 1, 2017), author profile.
Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/ (January 25, 2017), Agatha French, “James Hamblin explains dimpleplasty while touring with his book If Our Bodies Could Talk.”
Politico, http://www.politico.com/ (October 1, 2014), Nicole Levy, “The Young Doctor.”*
James Hamblin (journalist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
James Hamblin
James Hamblin at Spotlight Health Aspen Ideas Festival 2015.JPG
Born 1982 [1]
Residence Brooklyn, New York
Occupation Writer, Editor
James Hamblin M.D. is a writer and senior editor for The Atlantic.[2][3] He focuses on writing about health, and he is the host of the online video show If Our Bodies Could Talk.[4] He is also the author of If Our Bodies Could Talk,[5] a general-interest textbook of anatomy and physiology published by Doubleday in December 2016.[6]
Hamblin is a past Yale University Poynter Fellow in journalism.[7] In 2016 he served as moderator at the launch of the White House Precision Medicine Initiative where he interviewed President Barack Obama.[8] Hamblin has been named among the 140 people to follow on Twitter by Time, and BuzzFeed has called him "the most delightful MD ever." He has also been compared to Doogie Howser.[9]
The young doctor
By NICOLE LEVY 10/01/2014 06:20 AM EDT
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James Hamblin, M.D., is 31, but he looks a decade younger. This was a curse when he worked as a radiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles Medical Center: patients mistook him for a student and doubted his competence. Worse, they remarked on his likeness to Doogie Howser, M.D. of the eponymous ‘90s sitcom starring Neil Patrick Harris as a teenage genius. To cope, Hamblin adopted a serious bedside manner.
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But his youthful looks became a blessing after he left the medical profession and joined The Atlantic as editor of its health channel in 2012, starting a video series on the magazine’s website called “If Our Bodies Could Talk” in 2013. Whether he’s asking a gynecologist to shed light on the “dark and mysterious” vagina, declaring the high incidence of Americans eating lunch at their desks a “public health hazard,” or endorsing “tabless Thursdays” as a means of staying focused online, Hamblin conveys an earnestness that won from Buzzfeed the epithet “most delightful MD ever.”
Hamblin isn’t a traditional media doctor—a representative of mainstream medicine, or a mouthpiece for alternative healing, or a heartthrob to daytime television viewers. Yes, he seeks fame, but he no longer practices medicine. He studied improv at the Upright Citizens’ Brigade training center in Los Angeles, a launching pad for comedians like Aziz Ansari and Amy Poehler. And he considers the posting of his written work on Reddit, the front page of the internet, a validation of its quality.
In the internet age, this is how a man becomes a media doctor: he attends medical school at Indiana University on scholarship, then studies internal medicine at Harvard for a year. He decides to specialize in radiology because he loves the problem solving involved in interpreting scans, but he comes to feel isolated and dissatisfied, writing reports that other doctors read but rarely discuss with him. He lives a double life of doctoring by day, studying improv by night. So he finds a job listing for a health editor position at TheAtlantic.com that he thinks will stitch his halves together.
“It was easy to ascertain quite quickly that Jim didn’t just have medical authority, although that was important to me, but he had a discerning intelligence, moral seriousness and a playful sense of creativity, too,” said John Gould, editor of TheAtlantic.com.
Launched in December 2011, the website’s health channel was hardly an obvious extension of The Atlantic brand, which is known for its coverage of politics, economics and culture.
“It’s not just medicine, but lifestyle stuff that kind of anybody can write about,” said Hamblin, who passed along editorship of the health channel to Julie Beck this summer, but continues to write for the site and, as of the October issue, the print magazine. “Everybody has bodies and lives and relationships.”
The challenge for The Atlantic Health is, as Gould put it, “creatively wrestling with the burden of being The Atlantic and at the same time writing things and making media that people want to read or watch.” In a subject area that is rife with clickbait headlines, reductive lists and sensationalized content, where the formulaic frame for health advice is “three ways you’re ruining your life” or “five tricks to make it better,” how do you engage readers with a nuanced analysis of modern medicine and its ambiguities? Hamblin has exchanged an authoritative, grave demeanor for a comically awkward one.
“If you try to exaggerate things or oversimplify or sensationalize in any way, it develops this bad taste in people’s mouths,” Hamblin said. He takes umbrage at the Dr. Mehmet Ozzes of medical media, whom he characterizes as promoting dietary supplements with magical results, and the Malcolm Gladwells, whom he accuses of selectively citing evidence to support their ideas.
“There’s totally a way to report on some fringe study of 16 people, but it’s got to be, like, light and fun and bring some interesting analysis to it other than, ‘Be scared, or change your habit.’ More like, ‘This is an interesting thing to think about and here’s why.’”
Writing up one study that concluded moderate wine drinking was only protective in people who exercised, Hamblin noted the finding was “just another drop in the conflicting wine research well.”
“On a final dry note,” he said, “the European Society of Cardiology reported that the participants in the study were required to return the corks from the wine bottles to confirm that they indeed drank the wine and did not sell it.”
“If Our Bodies Could Talk” is the most popular among The Atlantic Video’s 10 original series. Since it premiered online last year, the series has accounted for 17 percent of the channel’s total video streams, an increasingly important platform for Atlantic Media’s ad sales and one that other print organizations have tackled with varying degrees of success.
On a Tuesday morning in Washington D.C., the producer of “If Our Bodies Could Talk,” Katherine Wells, was filming Hamblin from behind. At the instruction of a yoga teacher, he was bent over, his legs spread, his hands touching the floor.
“The most flattering possible shot,” Hamblin remarked. And referring to his red shirt: “All my blood’s in my face so it’s red, too.”
“It looks great,” Wells replied.
“Does it?”
“For my purposes.”
Wells’ delicate voice is the off-camera, Wizard-of-Oz presence in many of Hamblin’s videos. She goads him into experiencing the things he thinks about, firing off wry barbs that leave Hamblin fumbling for a comeback.
When Hamblin and Wells started filming “If Our Bodies Could Talk” last November, they wrote scripts for the doctor to read to her camera.
“It was meant to be funny,” she said later that Tuesday, after the duo and assistant producer Paul Rosenfled had wrapped up a video constrasting yoga and CrossFit as exercise regimes and lifestyles.
“But it felt forced and I suck at acting,” he added.
“He said it, so—”
“No, I don’t suck.” Hamblin countered. “It just couldn’t sound not forced.”
Deciding that Hamblin was his funniest when he ad libbed, they decided to scrap the scripts and improvise.
“They have a really great dynamic, and I love that it’s creeping into the videos,” said Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, executive producer of video at The Atlantic.
It is Wells’ responsibility to make sure that the joke is always on Hamblin. When they film, she redirects his commentary when it runs into sober territory (“Too real, Jim”), and she nods encouragingly when Hamblin is elevating a comedic premise, such as what his life would be like if he were to take up yoga. (He and his family would eventually move to Greenland.)
With his producer’s help, Hamblin “undercuts himself as a medical authority at least as much as he undercuts anyone or anything else,” Gould said. “He uses that as a modality of entertainment but also a modality of intelligence.”
The days when Americans saw doctors as quasi-heroic figures in shows like “Marcus Welby” and “General Hospital” are over and the popular perception of the profession has deteriorated in the decades since; on television, in “House” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” physicians have professional and personal flaws. In real life, they spend an average of eight minutes with their patients because they have so much paperwork to do, according to a 2013 study published in The Journal of General Internal Medicine.
i - hamblin2.png
Hamblin’s videos are brief, too, but always personable. The information they deliver about the health effects of drinking wine, exercising at work, and socializing is intended to entertain, rather than advise.
“It just seems like most people seek that stuff out when they have a problem, or are looking for an answer,” said David Young, a writer for “The Tonight Show” and one of Hamblin’s childhood friends. “Jim is creating a community. They’re not just seeking him out when they have something wrong.”
The Atlantic’s online video operation has come a long way since it launched under Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg in 2011. The executive producer of video, then a senior associate editor, began by posting videos from other sources with her own commentary. The experiment proved that videos were attracting viewers and advertisers, and in 2013, von Baldegg hired two producers and a paid fellow to produce original videos, some standalone pieces and some in collaboration with the magazine and digital editorial teams.
Atlantic Video has seen its video plays triple in two years, the magazine announced in August. This aligns with reports from the rest of the U.S. media industry: in 2013, advertising dollars spent on digital video increased 19 percent year-over-year to $2.8 billion, and in 2014, the number of American adults watching digital video every month rose 15 percent to 52 million, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Most viewers come in through TheAtlantic.com homepage or Facebook, von Baldegg said, although videos are also posted on YouTube and Vimeo.
With her background in documentary filmmaking and her conception of The Atlantic Video’s portfolio as mirroring the magazine’s mix of short and long, as well as fun and serious content, von Baldegg seems to worry that viewers binging on Hamblin’s snack-y series won’t partake in heartier fare. When fans tell her “that doctor, his videos are funny,” she asks, “Did you see the 10-minute documentary we made about housing discrimination in the ‘60s?” referring to a video that complements the magazine’s May cover story, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations.”
But Hamblin is concerned that The Atlantic’s reputation, as that thought-leader monthly founded by the likes of essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, skews too seriously overall.
“Some people think The Atlantic is this buttoned-up 1857 old stodgy publication, and it’s so not,” Hamblin said. These days, its offices are the backdrop for the editor as he stages “running meetings” and half-heartedly attempts the Master Cleanse diet for “If Our Bodies Could Talk.”
The video series’ quirky hypothetical title is an effort to alter the public’s perception of The Atlantic brand as “two older people in suits discussing foreign policy nuances,” Hamblin said. “This is different and you should know that from the very beginning.”
Hamblin’s biggest fan at Buzzfeed, staffer Allison Bagg, has a more measured take on his creative impact. “I definitely think that James’ videos are very accessible and perhaps broadening The Atlantic’s reach in that sense,” she wrote in an email.
In one GIF Bagg posted on Buzzfeed, Hamblin stands behind a door that opens again and again, looking far shorter than he appears in real life.
Hamblin plans to relocate his job to New York so he can get in on the city’s comedy scene, but the move means vacating a cubicle with a view of the Potomac River. There he sits on a stationary bike at a standing desk that was designed as a bookshelf. As he reasons in one video, workplace exercise keeps death away.
He keeps a glass jar of nuts at hand, a mixed selection because his research, as presented on TheAtlantic.com, shows that almonds may be “nutritionally, the best single food a person could eat,” but the diversion of water to almond farms in California, where 82 percent of the world’s crop are grown, is putting other species at risk during the state’s severe drought.
At lunchtime, Hamblin often steps away from his desk with senior associate editor Spencer Kornhaber to buy his meal down the road from the office. But is he still eating the “sad desk lunches” he’s disparaged on video?
“No one is perfect,” he said, hedging. “Dr. Oz eats a cupcake every once in a while.”
This article appeared in the October issue of Capital magazine.
Hamblin is a writer and senior editor at The Atlantic. He hosts the video series If Our Bodies Could Talk, for which he was a finalist in the Webby awards for Best Web Personality. He is a past Yale University Poynter Fellow in journalism, and he has lectured at Harvard Medical School, Wharton Business School, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and SXSW, among others.
His writing and videos have been featured in The New York Times, Politico, NPR, The Guardian, Elle, Mother Jones, The Washington Post, The Awl, The Los Angeles Times, and Marketplace, among others. Time named him among the 140 people to follow on Twitter, Greatist named him among the most influential people in health media, and BuzzFeed called him "the most delightful MD ever," though he is not as delightful as William Carlos Williams.
After medical school at Indiana University, he did three years of residency before joining The Atlantic to develop a health section and write. More on that at Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, Journal of the American College of Radiology, and Politico.
James Hamblin explains dimpleplasty while touring with his book 'If Our Bodies Could Talk'
James Hamblin
James Hamblin's book is 'If Our Bodies Could Talk' (Kasia Cieplak-Mayer von Baldegg)
Agatha French Agatha FrenchContact Reporter
“I read from the Death section at one of these [events] and it did not energize the room,” James Hamblin said Tuesday night to a small crowd at the Last Bookstore. The author of the new book “If Our Bodies Could Talk” — and host of the Atlantic’s popular video series of the same name — put his reading selection for the evening to a vote. What would it be: a passage about cosmetic dimple surgery, or the entry on Vitamin Water?
The room hesitates. “It’s graphic,” he says of the latter, and a few of the attendees, seated on folding chairs and squeezed together on The Last Bookstore’s vintage couches, perk up. “Dimples!” they call out. Hamblin seems delighted — it’s something of a local story, he offers — and begins.
Hamblin’s reading takes us on a brief, behind-the-scenes tour of a cosmetic surgery known as dimpleplasty, interviewing a pioneering Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, as well as a doctor in Pune, India. The word “suture” stands out for its repetition, as well as the phrase “splitting the muscle” and a sentence about “8 millimeter holes” being punched into someone’s cheek.The squeamish among us tune back in for Hamblin’s second reading — he circles back to Vitamin Water after all — in which he charts the rapper 50 cent’s lucrative sponsorship of the product. “Why is there Vitamin Water?” he opens, and then stops himself. “So yeah,” he says, “the book is all over the place.”
The “If Our Bodies Could Talk” video series offers “off-beat perspectives on health topics:” titles include “Crossfit vs Yoga: Choose a Side,” and “Sad Desk Lunch: Is This How You Want to Die?” Hamblin, who looks too young to have even held a job let alone made a career change, worked as a radiologist at UCLA before becoming a writer and senior editor at the Atlantic. While in Los Angeles, he also studied improv at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade, and his penchant for absurd humor seeps into his work.
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Hamblin has garnered something of an internet following (Time Magazine featured his account in their Twitter 140 2014, and he was a finalist for the Best Web Personality Webby award in 2015) and the crowd that gathered for his book signing was largely sharply dressed people in their twenties and thirties. Ryan Thomason, who works in data, finds Hamblin’s research “cutting edge” and his tone “more approachable” than some medical writing; he was inspired to read the book after making veganism his new year’s resolution. Janet Guan, a development associate at the nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice LA, is a fan of “scientific literary for laymen. Especially in this day and age,” she said, “any proliferation of knowledge” is welcome.
After the reading, Hamblin was joined by the book’s illustrator, Hallie Bateman. Soft-spoken, she said that she enjoyed the challenge of working on a medical text; her own work, and most editorial assignments, is “not anatomically correct.” She was inspired by middle-school text book drawings, and had to conduct her own research for accuracy. “I had no idea what the arteries in the leg looked like,” she admits. Hamblin writes about the funeral industry — “even at Walmart you can get a $5,000 coffin,” he says — and affordable alternatives, such as building a coffin for yourself. Bateman enjoyed this section in particular. Of a DIY coffin, “it could be pretty cathartic,” she says.
When, during the Q&A, a young man asks how Hamblin situates himself in the tradition of writer-doctors like Atul Gawande and others, he responds, “They write in a very traditional way that I hope to differ from enough to reach different audiences. This [book] is a lighter gloss.”
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Hamblin, James. If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body
Barbara Bibel
Library Journal. 142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p118.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Hamblin, James. If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body. Doubleday. Dec. 2016.416p. illus. notes, bibliog. ISBN 9780385540971. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9780385540988. HEALTH
Physician-turned-journalist Hamblin covers health news as an Atlantic senior editor. This book, based on a series of videos that he created for the magazine, answers people's most common health questions in an accessible and entertaining way. His introduction notes that ignorance is our most serious health problem and is the result of marketing that cultivates the denial of scientific fact. He also credits the denizens of the web who manufacture "information" online. He then examines aspects of anatomy and physiology using a question-and-answer format. Chapters cover broad areas: "Appearing" looks at eye color, curly hair, sunburn, and the Adam's apple; "Perceiving" examines itching, the immune system, sleep, and ringing in the ears; sections on eating and drinking cover rumbling stomachs, bad breath, sports drinks, tooth whitening, and alcohol's effects. "Relating" deals with sexuality, including the G-spot and gender transitioning. "Enduring" discusses heart disease, cancer, rigor mortis, and productive things to do with a dead body. VERDICT This excellent book cuts through media hype and bias to give readers useful information about their bodies and promote critical thinking about health.--Barbara Bibel, formerly Oakland P.L.
If our bodies could talk
Chatelaine. 89.12 (Dec. 2016): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Rogers Publishing Ltd.
http://www.chatelaine.com/en
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If Our Bodies Could Talk
By James Hamblin, $36.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Inspired by the video series If Our Bodies Could Talk by doctor turned journalist James Hamblin of the Atlantic, this book addresses all of your burning health questions (plus ones you didn't know you had), such as "Can I 'boost' my immune system?" (spoiler: no) and "Why do men have nipples?" It's a fun and informative read to pass around and discuss on lazy afternoons over the holidays.
If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body
Success. (Dec. 2016): p81.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 R & L Publishing, Ltd. (dba SUCCESS Media)
http://www.successmagazine.com/
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IF OUR BODIES COULD TALK
A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body
By James Hamblin
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
James Hamblin, a doctor-turned-journalist and creator of a series of videos at TheAtlantic.com, brings his offbeat wit to such timeless questions as: How much sleep do you really need? Do we really not yet know if cellphones cause cancer? Is it possible to boost the immune system? Will caffeine really make me live longer? Underneath the curiosity factor and his nerdy charm, Hamblin conveys useful information. That's a win-win for everyone. (December; Doubleday; $27)
If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body
Tony Miksanek
Booklist. 113.5 (Nov. 1, 2016): p6.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
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If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body. By James Hamblin. Dec. 2016. Doubleday, $26.95 (9780385540971): e-book (97803855409881.612.
Adam's apples, stomach rumbling (borborygmi), bad breath, drooling, male nipples, necrobiome (corpse bacteria), dimples: these are just a sampling of the medical curiosities examined by Hamblin, an MD and editor at the Atlantic magazine. His grab bag of health information is presented in the form of questions--practical, philosophical, and weird--that folks might like to ask a doctor but are perhaps embarrassed to do so. He writes with sarcasm, humor, and a sense of astonishment. Consider some surprising facts; individuals typically manufacture 1.5 liters of saliva per day. Twenty percent of U.S. adults have a tattoo. The average American eats just shy of 2,000 pounds of food yearly. Intercourse typically lasts 3 to 13 minutes. Hamblin tackles sleep, heart problems, antibiotics, the immune system, and aging. He does a stellar job with nutrition, covering supplements, multivitamins, energy drinks, and gluten. He calls out medical misinformation and marketing myths. He is troubled (as we should all be) by how money, politics, and industry distort scientific data and muddle health policy. Educational, entertaining, and a bit eccentric.--Tony Miksanek
If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body
Publishers Weekly. 263.42 (Oct. 17, 2016): p64.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body
James Hamblin. Doubleday, $26.95 (400p) ISBN 978-0-385-54097-1
In this fascinating book, Hamblin, a medical doctor and senior editor at the Atlantic, discusses why stomachs rumble, how much sleep we need, what causes cancer, and many more questions about the plethora of human bodily functions. Drawing on his experiences creating a video series (with the same title) for the Atlantic, he combines his own medical knowledge with consultations with scientists and doctors in different fields. Each chapter focuses on a category of "body usage," starting with the body's "superficial" parts such as skin and eyes, then moving into feeling, eating, drinking, relating, and finally dying. His explanations are thoughtful and interesting and often framed by a specific story or research study that provides context and clarifies why the answers are not always cut-and-dried. He delves into the many ways technology is driving medicine, touching on topics such as epigenetics (the role environment plays in gene expression), dysbiosis (disruption of the microbial system), and hormone therapy to support a person's sense of gender identity. Challenging what one interviewee calls the "scientific misinformation and marketing-based 'facts' " we are bombarded with daily, this book will be a useful tool for helping people get in touch with their own bodies. (Dec.)
Dear Spleen: You're Not That Funny
Dwight Garner
The New York Times. (Dec. 23, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: pC17(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Ain't you glad, Little Milton sang, that things don't talk? Especially our bodies. In the 1960s and '70s Reader's Digest printed a series of first-person essays with titles like ''I Am Joe's Lung.'' These were popular, and weird.
In ''I Am Joe's Heart,'' this vital organ emoted like a stereotypically aggrieved Jewish mother. ''When Joe thinks of me at all, he thinks of me as fragile and delicate. Delicate! When so far in his life I have pumped more than 300,000 tons of blood?''
Some of our organs, this time of year, are beyond speech. Recall the headline in The Onion, the satirical magazine, about a hard-drinking country singer: ''Liver Flees George Jones' Body.''
James Hamblin's first book is titled ''If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body.'' He's a graduate of Indiana University's medical school and a senior editor at The Atlantic.
His book began its life as an online video series, also called ''If Our Bodies Could Talk.'' His lo-fi segments are like ''The Dr. Oz Show,'' if ''The Dr. Oz Show'' were produced by self-consciously quirky interns from public radio's ''This American Life.''
Sadly there are no talking spleens or thyroids or wombs in Mr. Hamblin's book. Sadly too there is little identifiable soul in it. Its cardinal humors are wan.
''If Our Bodies Could Talk'' is a numbingly upbeat grab bag of anecdotes and factoids and curiosities with no through-narrative. As your literary M.D., I cannot recommend it, except in the tiniest doses. To sit by its bedside for very long is to watch a patient expire.
The strangling thing about ''If Our Bodies Could Talk'' is that someone has told Mr. Hamblin that he's funny -- there's an attempt at a joke in almost every other paragraph -- but he isn't actually so, at least not on the page. You recognize his jokes as ''humor,'' but they don't make you smile.
A typical formulation: ''Adrenaline is the hormone that's meant to be released when we are under stress and need energy, say, to outrun a bear or lift a fallen boulder off our climbing partner. (He's probably not alive anymore, but it's worth checking.)''
Not abysmal, you might think. But over the course of a long book these pokes in the ribs are monstrously wearing. They're like having a pebble in your ski boot partway down a long slope, or a lash you can't remove from your eye.
Mr. Hamblin is at his best in ''If Our Bodies Could Talk'' on those rare occasions when he drops his dementedly amiable tone. Once in a while he goes on the attack against greed and waste and stupidity in health matters, and things pick up.
''What is gluten?'' ''What makes hair curl?'' ''Do I need eight glasses of water a day?'' ''Why do males have nipples?'' This is the sort of trampled ground that Mr. Hamblin's book mostly covers.
He maintains an interest in offbeat diseases, such as one that makes some people scratch constantly and one that causes the human skin to easily rub off.
He dispenses offbeat facts as if they were canapes on a tray. ''The average person has about six pounds of skin.'' ''People with tattoos are six times more likely to have hepatitis C.'' ''We produce 1.5 liters of saliva a day.''
Then he turns to address the charlatans in the supplements industry, and his blood finally begins to simmer. Suddenly your eyeballs don't have to be forced to remain on the page.
He takes aim at a lobbyist-driven 1994 law called DSHEA (the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act) that prevents almost any regulation or safety testing of supplements.
Supplements, he writes, is ''a meaningless word that refers to nothing so much as a parallel pharmaceutical industry -- one that has accomplished the spectacular feat of selling billions of dollars' worth of most anything it likes, in almost any way it chooses, promising people anything conceivable about their bodies.''
You read this patriotic and well-made riff and realize that, in the bizarro world we occupy, it can't be long before Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds are named co-heads of the Food and Drug Administration.
Mr. Hamblin is just as good on drinks marketed under names like Smartwater and Vitaminwater and Fruitwater and Electrolyte Water. He quotes a doctor who tells him about Electrolyte Water, which is sold at Whole Foods, ''The city water in Philadelphia has more electrolytes.''
(The city water in Philadelphia is notoriously mediocre. In her 1974 novel, ''Oreo,'' the novelist Fran Ross reminded us that it has long been called, after one of the city's rivers, Schuylkill Punch.)
It's typical of Mr. Hamblin to step on his riff on dubious water products with a joke that's D.O.A.: ''Don't drink the Oil Water. It's for cars.''
We have a love-hate relationship with medical knowledge. It's so interesting and so terrible. Lucia Berlin, in her brilliant collection of stories, ''A Manual for Cleaning Women'' (2015), wrote about a nurse who considered the nature of clear colostomy bags and thought:
''What if our bodies were transparent, like a washing machine window? How wondrous to watch ourselves. Joggers would jog even harder, blood pumping away. Lovers would love more. God damn! Look at that semen go! Diets would improve.''
Like Little Milton, I'd guess, I'm glad we don't have that either.
If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human BodyBy James HamblinIllustrated. 371 pages. Doubleday. $26.95.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: PHOTO (C17); PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY KASIA CIEPLAK-MAYR VON BALDEGG) (C23) DRAWING: illustration from ''If Our Bodies Could Talk,'' written by James Hamblin, below. (DRAWING BY HALLIE BATEMAN) (C23)
If Our Bodies Could Talk Asks All the Important Medical Questions
Do probiotics work? Why do males have nipples? How dangerous are tight pants?
BY LISA CHASE
DEC 6, 2016
384
In a video titled "Wine Is Healthy—Isn't It? It Is—No?" from his Atlantic Web series, If Our Bodies Could Talk, the host, James Hamblin, MD, is asked by a peeved-sounding off-camera producer, "Why can't we just know if it's good or if it's bad?"
Hamblin, a baby-faced 33-year-old former radiologist turned journalist and Internet phenom, lets her have it: "Because nothing in the world is wholly good or wholly bad. You have to live with some ambiguities in your life. I get questions all the time: Jim, should I be drinking wine? Give it to me straight. Should I be taking a multivitamin? Do I need to see my doctor every year? Is CrossFit destroying my back? Are people who do CrossFit a little bit weird? Why do the same characters keep appearing in my dreams? Are CT scans causing more cancer than they're worth? Why am I pregnant? How many bananas is it safe to eat? How much gluten is enough to kill a horse?… These are complicated questions."
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His rapid-fire retort sums up the style and substance of his charming, engrossing, occasionally heartbreaking, and at times political new book, If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body (Doubleday). He's an engaging writer, and his is a curious mind, asking what feels like a million questions: Do probiotics work? Why do males have nipples? How dangerous are tight pants? So you find yourself passing by the book on the counter, opening up to a random page—Hamblin organizes it into sections with titles like "Appearing: The Superficial Parts" and "Enduring: The Dying Parts"—and 20 minutes later, you're still standing there, drawn into his flights of inquiry. These range from a serious medical assessment of "dimpleplasty" as a cosmetic procedure (he reports that dimple demand is up since Kate Middleton came on the scene) to "Should I seriously not be reading my phone in bed?" (answer: "That seems impossible. Why do people give impossible advice?") to "Am I having a seizure?"
This last query leads to a story about many things: A young girl with an extremely rare seizure disorder is operated on by Ben Carson, MD, who was then a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon (and in 2016 a Republican presidential candidate). The surgery, removing half her brain, doesn't go well; Fred Rogers, as in Mister Rogers, literally comes to the girl's bedside, she recovers, and in the end, we learn about the therapeutic power of humor.
If Our Bodies Could Talk does not set out to be comprehensive, and yet it feels holistically so—a testament to Hamblin's intelligence and humor. "There's undeniably more scientific misinformation and marketing-based 'facts' about our bodies coming at each of us daily than in entire lifetimes of generations past…as we increasingly read only the articles that appear in our inboxes and [our] curated social media feeds," Hamblin writes. He wants to challenge "that creep of ignorance" in the ways we care for our bodies and minds: "Sometimes the most interesting thing is knowing why we don't know, and the point is in the considering, and being comfortable in not knowing."
This article originally appeared in the December 2016 issue of ELLE.