The Body Eclectic
Nashville writer Michael Sims takes readers on an interdisciplinary tour of the human body
by Michelle Jones
Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form
By Michael Sims (Viking Books, $24.95, 288 pp.)
Sims reads from and signs Adam’s Navel, 6 p.m. Aug. 28 at Davis-Kidd
René Descartes was not an early riser. Having his morning lie-in one day in the mid-1600s, the philosopher noticed a fly meandering across the ceiling. Searching for a way to express the fly’s location mathematically, he found that describing the insect’s distance from adjacent walls was the solution. Cartesian geometry was born.
Three-and-a-half centuries later, Michael Sims found himself confined to bed following surgery. Rather than mapping the paths of insects, he mapped out an exploration of the human body—the subject of his latest book, Adam’s Navel.
Part user’s manual, part quotation compendium and part anatomy book, Adam’s Navel is an extremely well written tour of the body from top to bottom. From this basic form, the text takes off on a stream-of-consciousness exploration full of tangents, asides and references to both pop and highbrow culture, with Sims deftly reigning it all in by the end of each chapter. (A typical aside: “Incidentally, in case you have several of either around, the plural of atlas is atlases, but more than one supporting column are atlantes.” This, from the chapter on arms.) He describes the workings of the body’s components and repeatedly puts humans into their evolutionary and classificatory place.
Sims has a quick wit and a nimble mind, one that makes intriguing connections between seemingly disparate things. “These connections are funny,” he says during a phone interview from his home in Nashville. “In a specialized book of science, you don’t get much of that...or a book on body image will not talk about evolution. And you’ll turn to a friend and go: 'You know what this makes me think of?’ I just thought, let’s put those cross-indexing moments on the page.”
As one might expect, a book like Adam’s Navel requires a lot of research; Sims amassed 600 pages of notes during a monthlong tour of museums. Obviously, all of that information did not make it into the final manuscript. “I told someone that I could write Adam’s Navel again, a new book on the body, head to toe with the same chapter titles and format, and not use any of the same information,” he says.
Should he write that second edition, he’ll also have plenty of suggestions from readers. “Everywhere I turn, someone has a suggestion that they wish I had included,” he says. What could he have added to a book that devotes seven pages to eyebrows and 40 to hands? For starters, he might have squeezed Anne Sullivan’s spelling of “w-a-t-e-r” in Helen Keller’s palm into the hands section, and Toni Morrison’s bellybutton-free character Pilate Dead (from Song of Solomon) into the navel chapter.
But enough already. “I have never worked harder on anything,” Sims says of Adam’s Navel, “but also I have never had as much fun working on anything.” Now, with a related Web site (michaelsimsbooks.com) in the works and his third book under way, he’s got new connections to make.
