The Body Blog – Nonfiction Book Review

The Body Blog, author Rachel K Wentz

Thank you to author Rachel K Wentz for providing me with a copy of her book in exchange for this honest review.

The Body Blog book is a collection of online blog posts from the author Rachel K Wentz’s blog of the same name. She takes her experience as a firefighter and paramedic turned bio-archaeologist and uses it to teach us about the human body. She has some serious credentials and experience to bring to this field as well as unique stories that could only be told from someone with such an unusual career history.

I’m fascinated with the human body, my own job involves stripping them for parts. Or making bone and tendon grafts as someone more professional might say. I’ve studied for hours and hours about the subject. Unfortunately, that means none of the information in this book is new to me.

I’ve read so many anatomy and medicine based nonfiction entertainment books and listened to so many episodes of Sawbones that it’s really hard to catch me with something new anymore, at least on the human interest side of things. This made it hard for me personally to want to keep picking up The Body Blog.

If you are newer to the subject you’ll likely find this a good place to start. The chapters are just blog posts put to print so they’re short and easy to digest. The language is simple and all of the facts are brought back to real world examples. This is an entertaining and approachable strategy to the subject matter.

The Body Blog is a simple book for non-scientific readers. Wentz’s blog entries are short, opinionated, and lacking in references. Her anecdotes from her personal history can be an entertaining companion to the facts but the chapters have no flow outside of whatever she felt like writing that week.

As a book, The Body Blog is not one to sit with for hours at a time. It functions better as a blog, to be read in short bursts over the course of weeks. It has also not been edited to be more book friendly. Chapters sometimes start with blog openers like “last week I talked about,” or preludes about current events at the time of writing. Not exactly fitting for a paperback.

You may find this collection to be informative. Hopefully, it can at least pique your curiosity enough to continue down a medical and anatomical reading path. The subject is vast and this is a good enough starting point.

3/5 body parts 🦴🫀👃

For more anatomical nonfiction check out Human Errors.

in order to keep me up to my ears in books please consider using the following amazon affiliate link to purchase this product. it’s at no extra cost to you and would really help me out, thank you and happy reading!

Buy it here: The Body Blog: Explorations in Science and Culture