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A Short History of Nearly Everything
Authors :
Bill Bryson
| Release Date: |
06 May, 2003 |
| Manufacturer: |
Broadway |
| Availability: |
Usually ships in 24 hours |
| List Price: |
$27.50 |
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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 
Surely entertaining, but very anglo-centric
Rating: 4
Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" takes you on an interesting walk through the history of science, offering a good mixture of facts and fun. Of course, the entertaining melody of this anecdote-rich book occasionally comes at the cost of a certain superficiality, but this should not be held against the author.
What is quite disappointing, however, is that this "Short History" is endlessly anglo-centric. British, U.S. American or Australian scientists are depicted in detail with all their eccentric and usually positive attitudes, while non-anglosaxons are all too often troublemakers or simply ... absent! It is quite astonishing to read a history of science with big shots such as Galilei, Kepler, Kopernikus or Pasteur hardly or not at all being mentioned. Thus, Billy-boy, I give you five stars for chutzpah and only four for this book.
Biography, not history
Rating: 1
If you like to now the biography of almost every person, sometimes the relatives and neighbours too, who contributed to unfolding the secrets of the universe, buy this book. You really like that?
If u like to know scientific facts, buy another one.
This book could be named 'A long story about nothing'.
I learned so much
Rating: 5
Bill Bryson's enthusiastic voice leads the reader into an amazing concise history of some branches of learning. I learned so much, and he gave me clues as to where to continue to learn. I highly recommend this book to anyone whose science education is not up to date (isn't that most of us.) Suzanne Love Harris
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