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A Short History of Nearly Everything |
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A Short History of Nearly Everything
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by Bill Bryson
Sales Rank: 577
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Discount: 32 %
List Price: $16.95
$11.53
At Amazon
on 4-18-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 560 pages
Published by: Broadway September 14, 2004
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 076790818X
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0767908184
Book Dimensions:
9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
Weighs: 1.2 pounds
Product Review
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 greater 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
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
As the title suggests, bestselling author Bryson (In a Sunburned Country) sets out to put his irrepressible stamp on all things under the sun. As he states at the outset, this is a book about life, the universe and everything, from the Big Bang to the ascendancy of Homo sapiens. "This is a book about how it happened," the author writes. "In particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since." What follows is a brick of a volume summarizing moments both great and curious in the History of science, covering already well-trod territory in the fields of cosmology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, chemistry, physics and so on. Bryson relies on some of the best material in the History of science to have come out in recent years. This is great for Bryson fans, who can encounter this material in its barest essence with the bonus of having it served up in Bryson's distinctive voice. But readers in the field will already have studied this information more in-depth in the originals and may find themselves questioning the point of a breakneck tour of the sciences that contributes nothing novel. Nevertheless, to read Bryson is to Travel with a memoirist gifted with wry observation and keen insight that shed new light on things we mistake for commonplace. To accompany the author as he travels with the likes of Charles Darwin on the Beagle, Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton is a trip worth taking for most readers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: A Short History of Nearly Everything (Hardcover)
Bill Bryson is an excellent writer, no question. He's at once friend and informative, chummy without being condescending. The problem is that Bill Bryson is not a terribly well informed writer. I read an interview with Bryson in New Scientist not long ago in which he admitted that he really didn't understand a lot of what all these scientists were telling him, and unfortunately that's all too clear in reading this book. As a consequence Bryson gives you a good deal of infomation peppered with some really horrid misunderstandings and errors. I'm reminded in reading "A Short History" of Bryson's book on language, in which he either repeats or invents any number of terribly inaccurate folk etymologies. Also a very readble but terribly inaccurate tome. He's great fun to read on personalities (although the accuracy of some of his characterizations is suspect) and he does have an ear for fascinating trivia, but science takes a back seat to all of this. All too often we get the beginning of an explanation that trails off into a "and anyways it's all very complicated but it's it just fascinating" sort of gee-whiz summary. One suspect that we've just reached the point where Bryson has either lost the thread of understanding or perhaps just decided that he doesn't care to understand something any further. As enjoyable as Bryson can be to read, I only wish he'd had his manuscript vetted by editors with a solid science background, or better yet, collaboraated with a scientist on the writing. As it is, I can't really recommend this book. The reader interested in how science has shaped the world would do far better to read James Burke's justly well-regarded "Connections".
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A Short History of Nearly Everything
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