Human Body Revealed

Two old hands combine with a raft of illustrators and designers to produce a colourful anatomisation of our physical self. MRI scan pictures, thermographs, photomicrographs, and artists' impressions all dance gaily round the book's prime feature - transparent overlays and underlays. These allow the reader to practise virtual self-surgery, peeling back layers of skull or abdomen at will to examine what lies beneath them. This is all good fun, DK style, where complex explanations are kept to a minimum and never allowed to stand in the way of a snappy headline or a startling image. And 'startling' is the word, for that's what this slimmish and agreeably cheap volume is - a start-ling (i.e. a small start) capable of engendering a lifelong interest in blood and guts, bones and muscles. The strange thing is, though, that the body's largest organ - the skin, gets scant treatment on the last spread of all - now that's where a book like this should start, not finish.