Michael Sims (1958- ) is an American author of non-fiction.
Difficulty Level: Average
327 pages
Table of Contents
Overture: Skin deep
Part One
Headquarters
The Not-Quite-Naked Ape
Face-To-Face
The Vigilant Eye
Lend Me Your Ears
A Ridiculous Organ
The Archaic Smile
Part Two
The Weight of the World
Arms and the Man
The Monkey’s Paw
Madonna del Latte
Adam’s Navel
Part Three
A Leg to Stand On
Privy Members
Our Steed the Leg
* * * * *
Since God created Adam from the earth and then Eve from Adam’s rib, did either of them have a navel? This and many other questions and observations about the human body are posed and explored by Michael Sims while being bed-ridden after cervical surgery. Sims’s operation and recovery—specifically the amount of free time on his hands during this period—prompted him to begin meditating on the nature of the body and his end-results are entertaining, insightful, and thought-provoking. He divides the body into three regions—
head, arms and torso, and the lower extremities—and then tells the story of each one in a narrative that brews together self-observation, sociocultural beliefs, history, and a bit of story-telling.
And the body has a lot of stories to tell as Sims discovers. “No part of the body lacks a story,” says Sims, in his exploration of the visible parts of the body that make up the whole human form. His story subjects run the gamut from the everyday to the sacred to the profane: dreadlocks, Achilles’ heel, fingerprints, penis size, French kissing, breastfeeding, navel rings, ancient rules for shaking hands, why Nature made the male and female bodies different from one another, how Harry Houdini could pick a lock with his toes, and how evolution designed both childbirth and back pain. Sims’s sources are eclectic and plentiful: medicine, religion, mythology, cinema, popular culture, TV sitcoms, evolution, and anatomy and physiology.
Adam’s Navel is an everyday person’s tour of embodied existence, but I think its ultimate value is that it is a rough first draft, as it were, on interpreting human anatomy as an embodied experience. Highly recommended.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
References
Sims, M. (2003). Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form. New York, NY: Viking.