Bill Bryson is known primarily for high quality travel writing but a few years ago he decided to put his skills at extremely accessible writing into making a general science survey, resulting in this bestselling, award-winning book published in 2003.
A Short History of Nearly Everything aims to put the history of scientific discovery in the context of the lives and times of the scientists involved so that readers understand the progression and not just dry facts. As he writes in the introduction, as a schoolboy he simply couldn’t understand how a scientist “could work out what spaces thousands of miles below us, that no eye had ever seen and no x-ray could penetrate, could look like and be made of.” To his utter disappointment, no textbook he ever got attempted to explain this aspect of explorations.
I found the approach fascinating. As you might expect from previous posting I’m reasonably familiar with the broad strokes of modern science but Bryson’s presentation makes for page-chomping reading even so. His style is the key, consistently using simple everyday comparisons to convey some of the huge (and tiny) numbers involved and illustrating the very human relationships, good and bad, between contemporaries.
The book covers half dozen disciplines over nerly 500 pages: geology, paleontology, biology and evolution, chemistry, and physics. In each he follows the trail lain down by researchers right up until today (or the most recent relevant work), ending at a place that makes for a comfortable, natural transition to the next topic.
* (A Short History of Nearly Everything) is a great gift for the teenager doing well in science or gifted with computers to cover a serious gap in standard curricula or for the intelligent but not ‘book smart’ middle-aged friend or relative.
recommended
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