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A Short History of Nearly Everything By Bill Bryson ( Broadway )
Release Date: 2004-09-14
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Product Description
One of the world’s most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey -- into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.
In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Amazon.com
From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. Though A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as "The Size of the Earth" and "Life Itself." Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Life and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it's when Bryson dives into some of science's best and most embarrassing fights--Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould--that he finds literary gold. --Therese Littleton
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 Wonderful ( farhan_ghazali )
An instant, microwave version of the history of science covering various disciplines and told in the distinctive, witty voice of Bill Bryson. Wish school text books were this fun !
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A book for everyone ... ( genocarl )
Whether or not you're interested in science, I believe you'll love this book. Each chapter covers another aspect of science in utterly accessible language. Breathtaking chapters on the cosmos, the atom, caldera, and much, much more. It was easily the best book I've read on the subject -- ever.
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Delightful
Instantly one of my favorite books. My daughter taught English at Columbia and introduced me to this author. Who else could make geology and anthropology interesting and fun. No one I know. A great read that leaves you smarter.
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excellent ( mvdoc )
wonderful book, both educational and entertaining. It's one you can read over and over. There is so much information that it is really not possible to remember it all but it is delightful to read.
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A valuable service to society - don't quibble over facts ( natsfan )
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I'm not normally a "deep" reader, so I really appreciated Mr. Bryson's effort to make these subjects more accessible. In fact, after reading this, I was inspired to take another look at some of the more challenging titles in this genre. Therein is the real value of this book, from my perspective. He opens a door to us who tend to be a bit intimidated by the scholarly tomes about such topics as the life-cycle of a proton. Maybe we just need a little encouragement to dig a bit deeper. Those who focus on pointing out factual mistakes are missing the point.
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