It's impossible to appreciate Michael Sims' biological/historical survey Adam's Navel without taking its origins into account. Begun while Sims was on his back for two weeks recovering from surgery, Adam's Navel tours a rough course from the top of the human head to the soles of the human feet, stopping along the way to remember famous quotes and anecdotes about the various body parts, as well as some evolutionary theories about why humankind developed the way it did. Aside from the ordered biological structure, the book stays fairly free-ranging, and its barrage of factoids isn't assembled in any particularly logical way. At times, it's downright muddled, as Sims crams three or four references into a paragraph with only a minimal sense of connection or flow. His lack of cohesion may stem from the fact that he's onto something, however, and he wants to get it all down before he overthinks it and loses inspiration. The first section of Adam's Navel is titled "Neanderthals Yawned," and the book's overarching theme involves the way the very embodiment of human beings connects the past to the present and the rich to the poor. Everyone deals with more or less the same quirks and routines of being in a body; what changes is how society perceives its own corporeality. Sims details the egotism of humanity seeing its own face in inanimate objects, or presuming that the ability to make complex facial expressions somehow proves its superiority to lesser animals. Sims also considers how artists and theologians have regarded the ear and eye (lobes and brows inclusive), and he traces the varying fashionable stages of the penis, the vagina, and the female breast, as depicted in art or exposed on the street. Sims isn't always uniform in his study–he tackles surgical penis enhancement, for example, but skips breast enlargement and reduction–but he's consistent in his bemusement over the ways human beings name parts of their bodies and then obsess over their meaning, from the lint that gathers in navels to the desirability of pubic hair. And just as Sims was made aware of his own body after being rendered immobile, so he urges his readers to rethink every moving, feeling, oozing part of what makes them human.