Unless you are an extremely rare human being, you can probably quickly identify a person in your life, probably a boy, who is fascinated by bodily functions. If this person is seventeen or seventy-seven, there is no help for them. But if they are between the ages of four and twelve, it is not yet too late to help them blossom into a non-flatulence-obsessed member of adult society who will offer only a halfhearted chuckle over the late comedies of Eddie Murphy before their mind wanders on to more interesting things.

You Are Weird: Your Body's Peculiar Parts and Funny Functions is the fart-lover' passage into the more fascinating areas of biological study. It took a hardcover-to-hardcover reading of Diane Swanson's lovely book of scientific factoid and fact to prove to myself that there was actually no section on any of Chaucer's favorite sources of comic relief, despite two-page sections with titles like "Leaky Body" (how and why we sweat), "Dead-End Tube" (the appendix), and "Holes in Your Head" (sinuses); the closest we get to anything so scandalous is "Claws!", a section about fingernails that includes the timeless tale of that man from the Guinness Book of World Records with nails like distended watch springs. Well-illustrated, well-organized, and well-researched, You Are Weird features food for thought for adults as well as children, delving into topics of evolutionary biology like why we have too many teeth or what more highly evolved future humans might look like (maybe they'll write with their feet!) and making breezy comparisons between goosebumps and shorthairs, canine teeth and tusks, that will teach the scatologically obsessed that there are things more exotic than the bad smells our bodies make.

You can pick up You Are Weird on Amazon for around $14. - Jeremiah