By David Macaulay, Richard Walker
Macaulay spent six years drawing the inside of a person, and this is the result: three hundred and thirty-six pages that answer the question far past where anyone asked.
David Macaulay does for the body what he did for cathedrals and machines. He starts at a single cell and builds outward through seven sections until the whole person is assembled: the outer layers, the framework of bone and muscle, breathing, blood and the heart, eating and drinking, the wiring of the brain and nerves, and finally reproduction. The drawings are the reason it exists. He pulls the head open like a lid, sends tiny workers in to point at things, floats a lung on the page the size of your hand, and puts speech balloons in the middle of a serious cross-section. It is enormous, it is funny in places, and it is more thorough than any other body book written for someone under fourteen.
If your child has gone through every other body book and come back still asking, this is where the questions actually run out. Macaulay never explains a system in a paragraph when he can build it in front of you instead, so a child follows the drawing and picks up the anatomy without noticing they've been taught. The tiny workers and the jokes in the margins are what keep three hundred pages of physiology from feeling like homework. Be clear-eyed about who this is for, though. It is a reference the size of an atlas, pitched at ten to thirteen, and it goes into more anatomical detail than most adults have met since school. For one exceptional child it will be the best book they own for years. For a child who merely likes bodies, it is too much book, and the honest use for everyone else is as the shelf your grown-up questions get answered from.