At Home: A Short History of Private Life

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At Home: A Short History of Private Life

3.93 of 5 stars 3.93 · rating details · 25,160 ratings · 3,214 reviews

“Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.”

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has
happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy t...more

Hardcover, 497 pages

Published October 5th 2010 by Doubleday (first published 2010)

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Feb 29, 2012 Eric_W rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: history-historiography

Bryson brings us another fascinating tome filled with delightful trivia and anecdotes in this history of housing in Britain.

The “hall” as we know it today is a place to leave the muddy boots and hang coats. Originally, it *was* the whole house. With an open hearth in the middle and members of the family (this included slaves and servants since the one large room made everyone party of the unit) congregating around it, little was private and everyone shared in the heat (or lack thereof.) The inv...more Bryson brings us another fascinating tome filled with delightful trivia and anecdotes in this history of housing in Britain.

The “hall” as we know it today is a place to leave the muddy boots and hang coats. Originally, it *was* the whole house. With an open hearth in the middle and members of the family (this included slaves and servants since the one large room made everyone party of the unit) congregating around it, little was private and everyone shared in the heat (or lack thereof.) The invention of the chimney and fireplace (in the early 14th century) changed all that. Now private spaces could be created including an upstairs and separate rooms from which lesser members of the unit could be excluded. Sometimes fireplaces were built big enough to have seats in them since they radiated much less heat than the open hearth. On the other hand, smoke collecting on the ceiling would prevent birds from nesting there and many people complained that without the smoke they were more subject to ill-health.

Bryson, as is his wont and to my delight, wanders all over the place. His section on food, the politics and reality of adulteration, and the early methods for saving and transporting ice are simply fascinating. Lots of delectable trivia regarding eating habits and what they ate. The 18th century was notoriously gluttonous. Queen Anne got so fat she couldn’t walk upstairs and had to be lowered and raised through a trapdoor in the floor. That must have been a sight. And they ate foods we would never consider eating and sometimes vice versa. Lobster was considered such trash food that it was often written into agreements with servants they would not be served it more than twice a week, and in Massachusetts it was forbidden to serve it to prisoners. On the other hand in America Sturgeon was so plentiful that caviar was laid out on bars as snack food.

The relationship between servants and upper crust is detailed enough to provide a useful companion to Gosford Park. It’s perhaps ironic that servants might be said to really run the place and the tipping required of guests could make a weekend visit to the manor expensive indeed. Servants in America had a more egalitarian position - except in the South where slavery predominated. (It was pretty much abolished in the North after 1827.) The presence of servants and slaves had an effect on inventiveness and northern America was particularly adept at developing labor-saving devices although it must be noted that most of the labor saved was that done by men, some of the devices even increasing the workload of women. Electricity was to change all of that, and by WWI when blackout restrictions were vigorously enforced, people soon realized how accustomed they had become to having some ambient light at night. Cars were forbidden from even having dash lights so moving about at night became a distinct hazard. Bryson notes that during the first year of the war some 4000 people were killed in traffic accidents, a 100% increase over the previous year and the Germans, without dropping a bomb, were killing Britons at the rate of 600 per month.

This book serves as a welcome antidote to those of us suffering from a delusional nostalgia for the past when the society we yearn for existed only among the rich; the rest dying young from numerous diseases we no longer even recognize, or working at laborious twelve-hour jobs for miserable pay, and having nothing to show for it.

One of the most interesting sections dealt with the hazards of paint and wallpaper. I had no idea. Apparently, wallpaper was filled with toxic chemicals including a form of arsenic and moving a patient outside to fresher air had real benefits. It was noted early on that rooms with wallpaper had no bedbugs -- for good reason. Paint, as we now know, was also filled with noxious toxins and vivid, bright colors were prized, unlike the muted pastels we seem to favor today.

The temptation when reading such a book is to fill one’s review with delectable tidbits of trivia, a temptation to which I usually succumb.

And, by the way, Thomas Jefferson created the french fry.(less)

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Feb 05, 2011 Erin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

Let me preface this review by saying that, yes, I am a fan of Bill Bryson and I love history books.

At Home is not Bryson's best work. Its loosely-organized premise (a room-by-room history of everyday life and everyday objects) feels overly-contrived and, in practice, makes for a rather clumsy and wandering book.

I could only put up with a very little bit at a time. It took me a month to finish.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I read it. There are sundry interesting factoids to be had here, and you'll be a...more

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Jul 15, 2011 Jeanette rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: cultural-and-social-commentary, europe-and-british-isles, america, history, nonfiction

Bill Bryson's curiosity is boundless, and he loves research. He seems to have a particular fondness for digging up bizarre, creepy, and freaky tidbits to share with his readers. If you don't mind skimming over the dull parts, At Home is worth reading for all the trivia and historical weirdness Bryson shares.

The book is essentially a history of domestic life in Britain and America--its comforts and discomforts, and the inventions along the way that made things easier and cleaner. I found both th...more

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Apr 23, 2011 Barbara Bryant rated it 4 of 5 stars

I am still reading At Home, but it was an instant hit with me. I like Bill Bryson, for the most part, and he seems to be a family favorite around here. This is essentially a sampling of English history, told through the rooms of the parsonage in which Bryson lives in England. Basically, he wanders into the kitchen, say, and spins the history of how people once lived in one-room houses with a side kitchen, tells what they ate, what their hygiene was like and how classes were or were not separated...more

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Dec 21, 2010 William Ramsay rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a very hard book to categorize. Ostensibly, it's a description of the author's home in England, but that really doesn't cover it. All I could think of as I was reading it was a great conversation. If we went to his home - an English parsonage built in 1851 - for dinner we would, of course, talk about the house, but like all really great conversation the talk would ramble off in every direction with stories that had nothing to do with this particular house or houses in general for that ma...more

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Jan 17, 2011 Sonja rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favourite, non-fiction

I came across a review that dismissed Bill Bryson's work as being entertaining fact collection that doesn't present anything new. I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, if not the implication. There is nothing wrong with entertaining fact collection, and, in my mind, everything right with it. In this age of information overload, the kind of clear-minded research and fact-sorting he performs for his readers is manna sent from communication heaven. The ability (and the willingness) to collect,...more I came across a review that dismissed Bill Bryson's work as being entertaining fact collection that doesn't present anything new. I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, if not the implication. There is nothing wrong with entertaining fact collection, and, in my mind, everything right with it. In this age of information overload, the kind of clear-minded research and fact-sorting he performs for his readers is manna sent from communication heaven. The ability (and the willingness) to collect, order, set out and present information in the most simple and logical way possible is something that I will always treasure in my favourite writers and thinkers. The desire to popularise science and historical research marks an author, for me, as intellectually generous.

The fact that the book has such a logical flow is actually a triumph, arising primarily from the the way the facts have been organised. The hallmark of a good idea is the way it seems blindingly obvious in retrospect, and it must be said that it was very astute to choose the home as an organising metaphor, one with which every reader is familiar. A history of domestic life could just as easily been organised chronologically, for example. Or divided into discrete units by subject - 'servants', 'hygiene', 'architecture' - just like the school textbooks that turned us off this stuff in the first place.

Using a tangible concept allows Bryson to create easily-visualised conceptual spaces from which to launch his explorations, allowing him ramble freely across history, linguistics and science without losing us. It allows him a safe space to create links between Victorian prudishness, evolution, poor houses and nursery rhymes without leaving us reeling in confusion. The judicious introduction of a smattering of already-familiar historical figures such as Washington, Jefferson, Columbus and Darwin also saves the narrative from spiralling into abstraction.

In my view, the real magic in Bryson's brand of popular science is turning everyday items into objects of mystery. Why have pepper and salt become the only two condiments that feature on every western table? Why do forks have four tines and not five? Why do we cultivate lawns? Why do we have buttons on our jacket cuffs? Why are pigs eaten and dogs domesticated and not the other way around? Everything from our windows to our mattresses suddenly holds a story.

I have enough of an aversion to the Dan Brown brand for it to have prevented me from reading any of his work, but I have the deepest admiration for the way he, in a similar manner, has been able to suggest that existing, accessible, tangible locations hold clues to a larger conspiracy. Injecting a little bit of play into everyday life is a marvellous thing. And stretching it a little further, it's not so different from Foursquare, which also transforms our everyday places into part of a broader narrative (in the case of Foursquare, a social narrative, in Bryson or Dan Brown's case, an historical narrative).

Making us feel like we have a tangible connection to our own history is important for someone like me, and presumably some others of my generation, who don't feel it very often. Suddenly, the USA's AT&T, which I only know from its stranglehold over iPad contracts, is also Alexander Graham Bell's American Telephone & Telegraph company. The tobacco we smoke is the same stuff that the fifteenth-century American Indians were inhaling, and we're still eating stone age crops and using the names of their gods for the days of the week ('Tiw, Woden, Thor... and Woden's wife Frig').

I'm also a sucker for anything that links real life with the abstractions of language, and the book's full of etymological delicacies for language nerds. For example, we find out that the earlier incarnations of our 'toiletries' could be found on the 'toile' cloth on top of a dresser, 'banquet' comes from the french word for the benches people used to sit on, and the pantry or 'bread room' is derived from the latin word 'panna'. And why do we still say 'sleep tight'? Because we used to kip on mattresses supported by ropes that could be tightened by a key.

On the other hand, the book also forces us to consider how abruptly different our current period is from most of the rest of human existence.For instance, Bryson tells me that although running water has been around since Caeser was a boy, adequate lighting and heating are luxuries that are extraordinarily recent. Even the weekend is a very young concept. Doctors haven't been washing their hands between patients for very long, and operations, anaesthetic, germs, vitamins and minerals were unknown terms not so long ago. People haven't been washing their whole bodies at all, or even parts of it regularly, for most of history. The logical consequence of all of this, as far as I can see, is for us to reconsider those things we take for granted, which is never a bad thing.

For me, this is another way of disempowering the almighty status quo, calling into question the norms we take for granted by showing how they are culturally determined and stubbornly anchored to an historical context.

It's easy to read, it's full of facts you can pull out during the next awkward silence. And, to quote Winnie the Pooh, 'it's more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy ones'
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May 08, 2012 Carl Williams rated it 1 of 5 stars

I read this book against my better judgement, and indeed my judgement was right. Having read A Walk in the Woods by the same author, my daughter's mother-in-law, though I was quite open about not liking it, thought I'd like this one.

And I do like this kind of book...one that wanders around history making unexpected connections and has little asides of coincidence. But I find Bryson to be arrogant and patronizing. Clearly an Anglophile he speaks with disdain of other nationalities. If you don't b...more

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Jun 05, 2011 Janis Williams rated it 3 of 5 stars

So far so good. This is a room-by-room history of the western European house. It is full of trivia, so I enjoy marking places and announcing factoids to my family. It's first chapter describes the Crystal Palace. Not that edifice in Southern California, but the wondrous mammoth green house in Victorian England--large enough to enclose elms.

This was a very satisfying book, indeed.

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Mar 18, 2011 Anita rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction-read

If Bill Bryson and Sarah Vowell wrote all the history texts, and Mary Roach wrote all the science texts, our society would be more educated and amused than anywhere on earth. I want to say that this book was a greatly informative text on the history of sanitation, architecture, anglo-saxon culture, farming, growth of cities, and society in general, but I'm afraid that would put you off.
This is the story of his house in England. He takes us through each room discussing the history, scientific br...more

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Sep 10, 2012 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, nonfiction, humorous

If you like to learn a little about a lot, then this is the book for you. Bryson takes the home he lived (lives?) in in Norfolk, England--an 1851 rectory--and uses it as a jumping off point for everything from why so many British estates are named "something" Hall to why there are rows of completely useless buttons on the sleeves of most jackets. He covers the Great Exhibition and the construction of the Crystal Palace; the uncovering of the neolithic village of Skara Brae on the Orkney Isles; t...more

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Apr 05, 2011 Jennifer rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, favorites

Whenever I'm asked about my favorite authors, Bill Bryson always makes the list. Not only has he written a string of humorous yet informative travel narratives, he's also penned a memoir about his 1950s childhood and a variety of non-fiction books on topics as diverse as the English language, Shakespeare and a rather grand attempt at a book called A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bryson is able to make whatever he is writing about amazingly interesting while also being gently humorous. I've...more Whenever I'm asked about my favorite authors, Bill Bryson always makes the list. Not only has he written a string of humorous yet informative travel narratives, he's also penned a memoir about his 1950s childhood and a variety of non-fiction books on topics as diverse as the English language, Shakespeare and a rather grand attempt at a book called A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bryson is able to make whatever he is writing about amazingly interesting while also being gently humorous. I've always thought that if Bill Bryson wrote the history and English textbooks for schools, everyone would do their required reading and come away bursting with information and insights. Whenever someone tells me that they don't like nonfiction, I always ask if they've read Bill Bryson. To me, he is the epitome of the accessible nonfiction writer, and I would follow him anywhere.

In At Home: A Short History of Private Life, I followed Bryson as he toured his family home, which just so happens to be an old English parsonage. As he goes through each room, he ruminates about why we live the way we do and how the rooms and things in our homes evolved. The journey through the house is riveting and educational—answering such questions as: Why are salt and pepper the two condiments we keep on our kitchen tables? What does "board" mean in the phrase "room and board?" Why are there four tines on a fork? Why do men have a row of pointless buttons on their suit jacket sleeves?

Each chapter focuses on a different room, allowing Bryson to explore things such as the history of hygiene in the bathroom, the advent of electricity while poking around the fuse box, and the important issues of sex, death and sleeping while visiting the bedroom. It is an ingenious way to structure the book, and it gives Bryson lots of leeway to ramble about wherever his interests and research took him. For the most part, Bryson focuses on the last 150 years, which encompasses the time from when his home was built until modern times—and also, as Bryson points out, when "the modern world was really born.

The book is packed with interesting stories, facts, anecdotes and histories that if I took the time to tell you about all the ones that interested me, I would be writing a book myself. So, I'll content myself with sharing a few excerpts from the book that I highlighted while reading. (And even then I had to cut out a few because I highlighted so many.)

On the popularity of hermitages: For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for £100 a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub.

Statistics on stairs: Everybody trips on stairs at some time or other. It has been calculated that you are likely to miss a step once in every 2,222 occasions you use stairs, suffer a minor accident once in every 63,000 uses, suffer a painful accident once in every 734,000, and need hospital attention once every 3,616,667 uses.

On Christopher Columbus: It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. He filled his holds with valueless iron pyrite (thinking it was gold) and with what he confidently believed to be cinnamon and pepper. The first was actually a worthless tree bark, and the second were not true peppers but chili peppers—excellent when you have grasped the general idea of them, but a little eye-wateringly astonishing

A more interesting side effect of lead paint: One of the quirks of lead poisoning is that it causes an enlargement of the retina that makes some victims see halos around objects—an effect Vincent van Gogh famously exploited in his paintings. It is probable that he was suffering lead poisoning himself. Artists often did.

On servant-master sleep arrangements: Even at home, it was entirely usual for a servant to sleep at the foot of his master’s bed, regardless of what his master might be doing within the bed. The records make clear that King Henry V’s steward and chamberlain both were present when he bedded Catherine of Valois.

On the difficulties of getting medical care while being a woman: As late as 1878 the British Medical Journal was able to run a spirited and protracted correspondence on whether a menstruating woman’s touch could spoil a ham.

On the dangers of life before proper sewer systems: Most sewage went into cesspits, but these were commonly neglected, and the contents often seeped into neighboring water supplies. In the worst cases they overflowed. Samuel Pepys recorded one such occasion in his diary: “Going down into my cellar … I put my foot into a great heap of turds … by which I found that Mr Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me.”

I just adored this book and was engrossed through all 512 pages. This is vintage Bryson, and his fans will not be disappointed. And, if you've never read a Bill Bryson book before, I strongly encourage you to do so. No one presents history with as much humor, accessibility and curiosity as Bryson. (And if there is someone who does, I need to know who it is!) And since we all live in homes of some kind, I'm sure everyone will find something of interest in this book. After all, we are all benefiting from the advances and history described in this book. For my part, I know that I'll never turn on a light, flush a toilet, sit in a chair, or walk up a flight of stairs without thinking of some anecdote from this book. Highly recommended.(less)

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Dec 20, 2010 Lena rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

When Bill Bryson moved into an old rectory in the English countryside, he became curious about the various features of his house and how they came into being. In At Home, he traces the development of human domestic living from its often unexpected origins to the taken-for-granted, gadget-filled dwellings we now live in.

This is my first book of Bryson's, but I will definitely be reading more. He has a clear, engaging style that has a way of making everything he talks about deeply interesting. Whi...more

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Nov 28, 2010 JG (The Introverted Reader) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arc, own, 4_stars, author_american, non-fiction, read_in_2010, received_for_review, reviewed

We take so much in our daily lives for granted. Bill Bryson looked around his house one day, realized how little he knew about the everyday objects surrounding him, and, being Bill Bryson, decided to research and write a book about them.

I read this slowly as my before-bed book, and I'm not sure that was always a good idea. Reading about how ingenious rats are as I hear the pitter-pat of little rodent feet in my attic space is not necessarily a good idea. But at least now I know who invented the...more

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Dec 17, 2012 Jason rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2012

In At Home, Bill Bryson returns to the way of telling a story that he brought to us in A Brief History of Nearly Everything. This is to say, he introduces a subject and then interrupts himself seventeen times to explain a series of back histories that take you completely off of the subject, but which give you an incredible breadth of understanding. Sure, you've forgotten what he was talking about in the first place, but you'll get back on track just soon enough for him to derail you once again....more

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Mar 24, 2011 Kathy rated it 2 of 5 stars

This is pretty fascinating and I generally like Bill Bryson, but the book is heavily concentrated on the fascinating discoveries/inventions/accomplishments of men. Women are only mentioned for the silly things they did as the wives of these men or for writing silly books Bryson describes as "unreadable then and probably unreadable now." Apparently in all his exhaustive research on the history of private life, Bryson found no significant contributions by women.

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Aug 24, 2011 E rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

Houses are where history ends up. Could there be a better premise for such a book? Bryson is impressively adept at planting seeds of interest in the lay reader.

Yet I seem to be the only one who wishes he would prune away the mini-biographies that bloom and overshadow the ideas at the root of his projects. He's a hopeless storyteller and often a great one, but I had to roll my eyes and then send them skimming when a brilliant concept like the essence of stairs devolved into yet another anecdote a...more

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May 19, 2011 Andy rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book has lots of interesting factoids but these are buried under many pages-long avalanches of words about "unfairly neglected" minor personages of history that are actually fairly neglected. It sort of delivers on the promise of telling us something about the home we live in and what's inside it, but the cost of that information is a ton of tangential trivia I found extremely boring. Others surely find all the meandering anecdotes entertaining and that's fine, but then the book should be t...more

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Aug 20, 2011 Liz rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011-reads, own, non-fiction

I'm always astounded by Bryson's ability to weave seemingly dull factoids into interesting and engaging prose. I loved At Home. There are so many things that I never even thought about that contribute to our modern way of life. I have never been more grateful to exist during modern times than I am right now.

One thing that I wondered about in this book was the seemingly random transitions from one topic to another within a chapter. The bedroom chapter ended up talking about the history of gynecol...more

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Feb 01, 2011 Jenne rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, favorites

Ooh, yes please. This is juuust the kind of thing I like. It reminds me of trying to organize a closet, where one thing leads to something else, and something else, and something else until you find yourself in the middle of re-installing a light fixture and you look over and the closet is in a mess all over the floor...anyway where was I?

Yeah, anyway, it's actually much better organized than I make it sound, and somehow manages to be organized chronologically AND spatially AND at the same time...more

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Aug 30, 2012 Barbara rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: commodity-history, nonfiction

Bryson takes the reader on a tour of his house that was once a rectory in the British countryside, using the various rooms as springboards to ruminations about the development of modern private life. Even though I think the digital age has brought about immense change in my lifetime, such change is apparently small potatoes compared to upheavals the industrial revolution effected. Bryson’s writing is jaunty, frisky, and detailed. He has a great eye for the absurd. It’s been interesting to altern...more

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Sep 01, 2012 Lisetta added it · review of another edition

Nel regno dell��infinitamente piccolo la vostra abitazione pullula di vita �� una vera e propria foresta pluviale di creature striscianti e zampettanti. Eserciti di esseri microscopici pattugliano le giungle infinite dei vostri tappeti, si lanciano con il paracadute fra i granelli di polvere, attraversano le lenzuola di notte per pascolare su quella vaste, deliziose ondeggianti montagne di carne che siete voi.

Un bel saggio, scritto in maniera scorrevole e interessante perch�� viaggia tra il pa...more Nel regno dell��infinitamente piccolo la vostra abitazione pullula di vita �� una vera e propria foresta pluviale di creature striscianti e zampettanti. Eserciti di esseri microscopici pattugliano le giungle infinite dei vostri tappeti, si lanciano con il paracadute fra i granelli di polvere, attraversano le lenzuola di notte per pascolare su quella vaste, deliziose ondeggianti montagne di carne che siete voi.

Un bel saggio, scritto in maniera scorrevole e interessante perch�� viaggia tra il passato (bello il capitolo dedicato alla servit��/schiavit��)e il presente, indagando sulle nostre usanze e abitudini. Anche se a volte tende a divagare troppo (in questo mi ricorda il modo di discutere delle ��matrone �� della mia famiglia per cui o sei dentro e segui velocemente tutti gli agganci tra un soggetto e l��altro della discussione oppure , ti eliminano a suon di parole apparentemente astruse, ma che invece hanno un loro perch��!) , molte delle notizie risultano interessanti e inquietanti:
-Bisogna tenere sempre la tavoletta del water chiusa, non solo per estetica e discrezione, ma anche perch�� vero che i topi risalgono le tubature,e senza che te ne accorgi, grazie alla loro prolificit��(un topo pu�� figliare anche circa 37 topini l��anno), ti ritrovi con un nugolo di piccini da allevare. Per inciso i ratti fanno sesso anche venti colte al giorno ( e ho detto tutto).

- Anche quando si tira lo sciacquone, bisogna tenere rigorosamente la tavoletta chiusa, perch�� altrimenti le particelle dell��acqua che fuoriesce dal servizio igienico, volano in tutta la stanza e le ritrovi delicatamente posate sui complementi d��arredo e non ultimo anche sullo spazzolino da denti.

-In tema di animali (non sar�� mai una donna di campagna), ora so con certezza che sono loro i veri padroni della nostra casa. L��hanno conquistata nel silenzio, e nella loro invisibilit��. Gli acari sono dappertutto . Dopo sei anni, il peso del cuscino dove poggiamo le nostre membra stanche, �� composto per il 30% da squame di pelle e acari. Acari acari acari sono nel materasso, nella polvere, che �� ovunque. Stiamo l�� a spolverare per vedere in controluce come le particelle ricadono inesorabili sul legno. Altro che pezze elettrostatiche ��.!

-Eppure ora so che l��unico insetticida che pu�� funzionare �� proprio pipistrello (che a me, inutile dirlo, fa tanta paura), ci sono alcune specie che possono arrivare a mangiare anche 600 zanzare all��ora. Quasi quasi organizzo un piccolo allevamento sul mio terrazzino, cos�� l��estate posso leggere in tranquillit�� senza inquinare l��ambiente.

Tra un ripasso all��altro di storia,tra una malattia all��altra tante e tante altre sono le curiosit�� di cui si parla: la descrizione minuziosa dei palazzi fastosi che venivano costruiti dai ricchi che hanno il vago sapore della fantascienza, il lato oscuro di Vasco De Gama e altro ancora. Allora vado a completare il libro mentre immagino Bill Bryson a conversazione con le donne della mia famiglia, sicura che terrebbe testa��..!

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Aug 05, 2011 Ted added it

Awesome, awesome, awesome, if you like historical trivia ---and how it affects us every moment we're in our home. I've read more Bryson books (11) than any other author--outside Shakespeare--and this is up there with my favorites, perhaps just below Notes From a Small Island.

The genesis of the book was when Bryson, sitting in his converted Victorian rectory, looked at the salt and pepper shakers on his table and wondered why we use THESE two spices. "Why not pepper and cardamom, say, or salt an...more Awesome, awesome, awesome, if you like historical trivia ---and how it affects us every moment we're in our home. I've read more Bryson books (11) than any other author--outside Shakespeare--and this is up there with my favorites, perhaps just below Notes From a Small Island.

The genesis of the book was when Bryson, sitting in his converted Victorian rectory, looked at the salt and pepper shakers on his table and wondered why we use THESE two spices. "Why not pepper and cardamom, say, or salt and cinnamon? And why do forks have four tines and not three or five? There must be reasons for these things."

And thus he walks us room to room, chapter to chapter, elucidating all the things we take for granted. "When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats where they don't actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have always been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet three hundred and fifty years on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity." If this is the kind of thing that intrigues you--and it positively titillates me--then read the book. Okay, titillation is a slight exaggeration. Read it anyways.

Bryson is superb at bringing humor to even the most dry history, and helps us look at the little and big things with new eyes. I bet you never thought the failings and technical advancements of London's sewer system could hold your attention for a dozen pages, but it will.

I must admit that part of my excitement in reading the book is due to the student trip I am leading to London in a week, a city where I lived on two occasions in the nineties. I have so many new spots (antiquarian spots, really) to search out: man-made ponds, nearly-forgotten gates, and maybe even a sewer. Getting thirteen-year-olds to care about all this might be the stuff of legends.

Looking around my 1920s apartment now, I would love to know the history of the six foot tall industrial-sized gas heater that goes through a wall to dominate two rooms. It better be a damn good story, history.(less)

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May 07, 2013 Amanda Hutchins rated it 1 of 5 stars

Normally I love Bill Bryson's work; he cracks me up and his travels make me want to pack a bag and get on a plane. Normally I can't stop reading a book halfway through; even if I'm not enjoying it I plug through to the end. But it was somewhere in the middle of the Fuse Box chapter that I realized I was not enjoying "At Home" and that I didn't have to suffer all the way through it.

Bryson seems to love doing research and when his odd facts and histories are interspersed throughout a travel memoir...more

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May 02, 2013 Brendan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Bill Bryson did it again. The man cannot write a mundane narrative. Having previously written on world travel and hiking the Appalachian Trail, he's also given us histories of Shakespeare and the English language. Maintaining his narrative focus on quirks and oddities, Bryson brings shine and levity to schoolroom subjects. At Home is no exception. With chapters titles such as The Hall and The Scullery, Bryson dissects the Western evolution of the home from the inside out. In his own nasal Americ...more

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May 01, 2013 Hanje rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

I asked my friend Hope if she was liking At Home. She said it is a book she wished she had written. I thought that was an interesting assessment. She also said that it made her miss England. (She had the opportunity to live in England many years ago, and has traveled there since.)

Hope and I have a lot of things in common, but we don’t always agree on books. This book we agreed on totally. When I read it I too wished I had written it. Bryson moves back and forth between the house, which is his j...more

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Apr 10, 2013 Indiabookstore rated it 3 of 5 stars

History of this and history of that, from answers for ‘which?’ to answers for ‘what?’, everything about everything at home can indeed be found At Home. Experiencing this research endeavor is like strolling around an old British home with a History Machine, you focus an object and its history gets displayed, delightfully.

Hall, kitchen, drawing room, dining room, cellar, study, garden, stairs, bathroom, bedroom… Each room in so analyzed British home is a 30 page chapter. At Home apart from concent...more

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Mar 23, 2013 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is a rambling mess, but in the best possible way. Although broken down into chapters titled by rooms of a house, they are filled with stories, anecdotes, and facts that often have little to do with the room title. But this is Bryson, and it works remarkably well. He has rabbit trails off of rabbit trails, and all kinds of meanderings, but they are almost always interesting and insightful. He can be so rambling, I chuckled when he used a few footnotes in each chapter to further chase a...more This book is a rambling mess, but in the best possible way. Although broken down into chapters titled by rooms of a house, they are filled with stories, anecdotes, and facts that often have little to do with the room title. But this is Bryson, and it works remarkably well. He has rabbit trails off of rabbit trails, and all kinds of meanderings, but they are almost always interesting and insightful. He can be so rambling, I chuckled when he used a few footnotes in each chapter to further chase a thought. What criteria in his mind had to be met for something to so far off topic that it was to be relegated to a footnote?

The book gives a history of human dwellings in England (and to a lesser extend America) from prehistory through the 19th century (and occasionally beyond). The focus is on the 19th century, a time period that peaks my interest. It is a time period where so much happened, and society went through great changes. Bryson seems to be equally amazed and interested in the change.

The research for the book appears to be vast. Bryson traces down many, many odds and end,s and interweaving stories. From his vast studies he gleans wonderful snippets of why our homes (and lives) are what they are today. And, since the book never focuses on one thing for too long, if anything is uninteresting, it never lasts.

One of the facts that created a lot of thought for me was about food. All food was simply food for a long time. There was no thought that different benefits (vitamins, minerals) might be gained from different types. Other than taste, it was all thought to be the same for the body. It seems so obvious now that it is hard for me to comprehend how people believed that.

Secondly, I was struck by how frequently people failed to see an obvious use for a new invention, instead, pigeonholing it into an already established use. The phone was one example. It was not used for talking to loved ones for almost a generation. Instead it was used to speed information in an official manner by businesses or the government like telegraphs did.

I commend Bryson for how much he talked about filth, hardships, and disease in the book. It was frequently uncomfortable to read. The facts of open sewers, human waste, coal smoke, and small pox are disgusting and stomach turning. I had a hard time really imagining a life full of them. But they were a reality in the not too distant past, and it is worth knowing about them. Without seemingly any intent, the book points a very damning finger at Industry for its repeated negative effects on human health.

Although meandering at times, I found the book very interesting. It is written in a way that I think would be enjoyable to just about anyone. An easy recommendation to all.
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Mar 18, 2013 Natalie Roberts rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a great book. I chose it after reading his "A Short History of Nearly Everything", which gave me a quick review of the development of science and filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge. I thought "At Home" would give me more background about the history of architecture, which it did. It drew together pieces from the development of English and American agriculture, the rise of class based society, the growth of our understanding of the germ theory of disease and how it changed public hea...more

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Mar 08, 2013 Kate rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: audio-book, non-fiction

Gosh, I like Bill Bryson. He manages to infuse some pretty boring non-fiction topics with pithy, dry humor and superb analysis. The premise of "At Home" is clever. Bryson takes a look at his home and decides to write a history of homes and the things in them. One caveat, he mostly focuses on homes in Britain, where his home is, and North America. He only ventures away from those environs when necessary. Also, if you read/listen to this, you must enjoy a jaunty tangent, because Bryson takes you o...more

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Feb 22, 2013 Tamara rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: flipped-through, non-fiction

Bill Bryson answers questions you never thought to ask. He is a genius. And yet, I have yet to finish any of his books...It probably says more about me than it does about him. (Shut up.)

For having read 15% of this book (according to zee Kindle), here is what I learned:

Favorite Quotes

The Old English word for a slave was thrall, which is why when we are enslaved by an emotion we are enthralled.

The dining table was a plain board called by that name. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and wa...more

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About Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. He settled in England in 1977, and worked in journalism until he became a full time writer. He lived for many years with his English wife and four children in North Yorkshire. He and his family then moved to New Hampshire in America for a few years, but they have now returned to live in the UK.
In The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson's hilarious first t...more

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“I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.” — 9 people liked it

“For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.” — 6 people liked it

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