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| View Larger Image | A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
| | List Price: | $16.95 | | Price: | $11.53 | | You Save: | $5.42 (32%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 703 | | Studio: | Broadway | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 560 | | Publication Date: | September 14, 2004 | | Publisher: | Broadway |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
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. |
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 |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 621 reviews)
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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.
September 04, 2008 | |
excellent
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.
September 01, 2008 | |
A valuable service to society - don't quibble over facts
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.
August 27, 2008 | |
The history of our world for dummies 
Bryson does a great job of compiling a huge amount of information into a mere 475 pages. It is well organized, easy to read, and surprisingly enjoyable considering the complexity of certain topics. While some subjects, like geology, microbiology and atomic structure were a bit tedious, I really enjoyed reading about astronomy and especially anthropology (my favorite class in college). This comprehensive book embarks upon the history of the world we live in, from the nothingness of a pre-Big Bang universe, to the atoms that compose everything, to the primordial soup that yielded life, and to our most ancient hominid ancestors. What makes this book work is not that Bryson presents the history of nearly everything, but how these everythings were discovered. He investigates the history of exploration and narrates how scientists discovered answers to some of the most fundamental questions pertaining to who we are and how we came to be (especially during the 18th and 19th centuries). Bryson's goal was to fulfill his readers in ways that textbooks never did and he did that in an entertaining and often humorous way. For someone like me who often cringes at the mention of certain science topics (physics, chemistry), Bryson's delivery felt comfortable and was not intimidating. Best of all, Bryson left me with awe and wonder at the sequence of events that led our planet to enable our existence.
August 17, 2008 | |
Interesting but not up to my expectations 
The book covers the history of several scientific areas and tries to tell a coherent story covering the most important discoveries. Most chapters give interesting information, but sometimes the historic trivia outnumber the scientific facts and figures. Chapters 4-5-6 are long winded and almost caused me to stop reading (they definitely need rewriting!). The second half of the book (biology, anthropology) has sounder foundations and is better argumented. It is certainly an interesting work for later reference and it gives an interesting and very extensive bibliography. Some of the conclusions are biased or lack correct arguments (especially where physics is involved, it often comes down to popular talking rahter than correctly argumented science, so in the end you learn nothing new). All in all a book worth reading and owning but a little disappointing, considering the enormous expectations formed by some reviews.
August 14, 2008 | |
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