School biology teachers, rejoice. The students who filled your labs but paid only drowsy attention to long explanations of meiosis and mitosis are likely now lining up for Bill Bryson’s latest bound-to-be bestseller, The Body: A Guide for Occupants. Your message will finally get through – if not in detail then at least in substance.

Discussing respiration, for instance, Bryson writes that what we breathe in is 80 per cent nitrogen, which “goes into your lungs and straight back out again, like an absent-minded shopper who has wandered into the wrong store”.

This your former students will remember. This is why Bryson earns the big bucks.

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At 450 pages, this is a healthily sized volume that is occasionally a little repetitious, and might have benefited from a visit to the surgeon for a little trim. Nevertheless, there are omissions, such as an absence of discussion of the body’s innumerable on-board parasites and the role they play, which is often beneficial.

Yet much time is spent telling us what we know we don’t know. “Your body is a universe of mystery,” says Bryson. Only 2 per cent of our DNA appears to do anything practical, and fully 10 per cent seems to be gibberish. No one knows why we yawn.

But what we do know is wonderful, and how we found it out equally so. Bryson often diverts into discussion of the lives of scientists involved in various breakthroughs. He is particularly keen to give recognition to researchers whose discoveries have improved the human condition but who have gone unfairly unrecognised.

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At times Bryson’s language is philosophically floppy. A description of the marvellous complexity of the eye provides the opportunity for a swipe at the Victorians for holding it up as an example of intelligent design. “It was an odd choice because the eye is really rather the reverse – literally so, for it is built back to front.” Yet he frequently discusses the “design” of other organs before reaching a discussion of childbirth in which he confronts the issue straight on.

“If ever there was an event that challenges the concept of intelligent design, it is the act of childbirth. No woman, however devout, has ever in childbirth said, ‘Thank you, Lord, for thinking this through for me.’”

Without Bryson’s existing reputation, it’s unclear whether this book would sell particularly well. He’s a master commu­nicator, but there’s a slightly plodding progress from one topic to another, and those hoping to be more than slightly tickled by the humour would do well to look elsewhere.

But just as he once did on the byways and back roads of Australia, the US and the UK, Bryson takes the reader on a little trip, not claiming the inside knowledge of most guides, but knowledge of the insides.