Not everyone is a science geek. Bill knows that.

I am a science geek. Not that I took a lot of science courses, but it's a source of fascination for me. There was a lot of stuff I already knew -- if you've read A Brief History of Time the first two chapters are a wash -- but there was also a lot of stuff I didn't. It is miraculously accessible and funny, like all of Bryson's work.

This is a textbook on its face, but at its heart is the diary of a grown man coming home every evening for a year with the words "Guess what I learned today" sparkling on his lips. It's fun to get excited about dinosaurs and asteroids and sub-atomic physics.

My favorite bit, though, it less cheerfully indulgent. In every chapter he peels up a little piece of unpleasantness about our world. How we've poisoned ourselves with lead for four generations with the American government barely batting a lash. How naked we are in the path of an asteroid belt, and how microscopic is our knowledge of them. More compelling -- how every century has had its known truths about the nature of the universe, and how frequently they're wrong.

This is my fourth Bryson book, after A Walk in the Woods, In a Sunburnt Country, and I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away. He's originally from Iowa, worked in England for most of his adult life, and now lives in Hanover, New Hampshire where I once played D&D every Sunday for three months.