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 titled something like "shooting the breeze with Bill Bryson; a rather long history of what few people care about." I liked the premise of the book and was hoping for something that stuck with it and got to the point a bit more often.