Children's Review: The Way We Work

An architect by training, Macaulay (The Way Things Work; Building Big) begins, appropriately, with the smallest units of the human body: its cells. In fact, he points out, "Everyone's journey begins as a single cell." Eventually that cell will divide into as many as 100 trillion cells. With a wink to his devoted readers, Macaulay breaks the cell down to the atomic level, and compares an atom (both textually and visually) to a tennis ball being pursued by a pooch in Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan--the only skyscraper he identifies is the Empire State Building (the subject of his book Unbuilding). A brief chemistry lesson follows, in which readers learn literally what they themselves are made of. Macaulay points out in his introduction that, while he introduces each of the body's systems separately, the cells and systems are all interdependent. The respiratory system, for instance, draws in oxygen and sends out carbon dioxide, while the circulatory system delivers that fresh oxygen "from the lungs to each and every cell and carries the waste back." But one uses the lungs and diaphragm as the central organs to transport the oxygen, while the other relies on the heart and a system of arteries (that carry the oxygen-rich blood) and veins (that remove the oxygen-poor blood)--and the ever-important valves that keep the rich and poor from mingling.
 
Working in colored pencils, Macaulay lightens up the proceedings with many humorous touches, such as a kickline of humans, each highlighting the body's various systems and the cells and body parts associated with it, or a couple of boys shooting paper airplanes into a highly magnified close-up of the nasal cavity on the in-breath (the woolly mammoth from The Way Things Work also gets a cameo, spleen-side). He also has a lot of fun with subtitles (e.g., "A Brief History of Chyme," the name for the partially digested food that enters the duodenum; and "Bridge of Thighs," for which the artist pictures a giant pelvis propped up by a pair of femurs against a backdrop of Venice). Most often, Macaulay's text strikes a tone of wonder ("It may be no match for a bloodhound's, but our sense of smell can distinguish between some 10,000 different odors"), reinforced by illustrations of tiny human spectators at the base of a giant skull or on a terrace overlooking the interconnected "zones" of the kidneys. For his exploration of the reproductive system, Macaulay brings that first single cell full circle. He depicts--through an illustration of solely the relevant anatomical parts--how sperm and egg join to form the first cell that, within it, contains all of the information necessary to generate 100 trillion other cells, and create an entirely unique human being. He treats his subject and his readers with equal respect.--Jennifer M. Brown