I found the book to be very informative. A mixture of facts and lived experience. I learnt a lot about the human body that I did not know. There are parts of the book that I would use as a reference tool.

I enjoyed this book. It was written in an unusual way because it explores the human body by combining anatomical facts, and the experience of people. It can be described as a tour of the human body. Mostly concentrating on the organs, the author has also used personal experience with medical practises, with an international dimension. The book will be more appealing to those interested in anatomy but because of the personal experiences others will also find it engaging.

I was a nurse for many years, and vividly recall that the part of my training I disliked the most was working in theatre. It was the late 70s and the male surgeons were god like beings who made the decisions, were always right and stuck to the mantra of "when in doubt cut it out"
Ms Weston's book beautifully captures a different ethos. Her explanations of anatomy and physiology are carefully written with a sense of wonder and often from a feminist perspective, and I particularly liked that, interspersed with these, were personal anecdotes and insights into the decisions surgeons and patients have to make around their health. She also touches on historical and philosophical ideas around the human body and how research continues to advance these ideas
A thought provoking read.
Thank you to netgalley and Vintage for an advance copy of this book.

A beautiful homage to the human body, Alive was a comforting read over a rainy week. I liked how the anatomical sections were woven in with personal anecdotes from Gabriel Weston, which made the book feel less clinical and more personal.

I did not originally look to see who the author’s audience was intended to be but as I was asked to read it I opened it up and got reading.

There should probably be a trigger warning: if you are of a delicate disposition your stomach will turn in the first few pages and that could be a good place to stop.

However my reading materials consist of a lot of crime novels that include post mortems of gory bodies after they have been scooped up from their final resting place or pulled out of a watery grave. So I continued.

I was thankful for my first twelve working years in pharmacy, for my first hand knowledge of the calamities of pregnancy gone wrong, for having been an athlete who now has replacement knee joints and even for living with multiple sclerosis : because Gabriel covers all these in her book and I had read up on all of them before. I cried when I recognised myself and my family but then got back to the placement of the caecum.

There is a lot of medical language used but it seems to flow in a way that makes it almost understandable, and there is no test at the end for us.

Gabriel’s writing was so effective that I could see her in the many and varied operating theatres as she described the horrors of surgical procedures. I get a bit squeamish watching Surgeons on real life television programmes and Gabriel gave me the same feeling. I am so pleased my appendix was removed aged ten. And all the other bits I am trying not to think about, although I do know that my professor of orthopaedics operated to hip hop music.

It has taken me longer to get my head round writing this review than it did to read the book. Rarely would I publicly thank an author but this book taught me a lot. Not only about anatomy but about care and empathy. And that nothing comes close to family. Thank you Gabriel and best of good fortune going forward.

Alive is a fascinating book - simply a work of wonder. It is hard to stop thinking about it. Author Gabriel Weston became a surgeon, a mother and a patient. Her different perspectives is interwoven in her writing. She successfully bridges the gap between scientific knowledge and the complexity of human experience. She demonstrates how miraculous bones are, what kidneys do,, how the brain works and what happens when they fail. The readers comes away thinking about the human anatomy in a completely different way.

I love a medical book, not in a weird morbid way. But ever since I became ill, I've become more fascinated with the world of health, and so when this dropped into my inbox, it felt right up my street.

I'm the kind of person who loves watching those surgery programmes where you watch people being operated on. It's fascinating. And I'm always amazed when I think that, apart from being much smarter than I am, a surgeon is no different to myself, just they took a science/medical route whereas I took media, but they can stop a heart, drain a person of all their blood, but keep them alive. It's humbling.

This isn't an easy book to read. I mean, the introductory chapter is an intimate description of an autopsy which isn't a very pleasant thing to read about, although very interesting.

Unsurprisingly, it's very technical, which makes for difficult reading, although don't let that put you off. Yes there were passages I didn't understand, terms I didn't understand, but it didn't spoil the reading. You just take it for what it is, for what she's saying. And you work out the bigger picture. And she's blended the technical bits with her own stories which is a nice balance.

It is a fascinating book. I was up until quite late into the night reading it as it was just so addictive.

What I really enjoyed was how personal it was. Yes she's gone into a lot of technical medical detail which is interesting, but she's given stories of her own illness, of her son's, which shows us the human sides of medics, who we often akin to Gods, and how they couldn't possibly fall ill.

I really love this book. It’s interesting and informative but also reads like a story. I learnt some things but more interestingly I experienced anatomy in a different way. Thanks to Vintage and NetGalley for the chance to read an early copy.

I learnt a lot about the specifics of the body from this book. Weston writes in a way that is easy to follow and it's clear that her time as a writer and broadcaster position her well as the author of a book like this.

The vignettes of Weston's own experiences throughout the book helped to bring an additional layer of human touch but were sometimes not so clearly connected to the chapters in which they were placed and the jumping back and forth was occasionally jarring.