First of all, this book lives up to its title. In this text we explore everything, from the beginning of time up until the beginning of human history, from the infinitely tiny hearts of quarks to the infinitely huge scale of the universe. Biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, paleontology - whatever your science of choice is, it's in this book. And what's more, it's fun to read.
One of the things that makes Bryson an excellent writer is simply his ability to make you enjoy reading his work. He's most well known for his travel books, such as Notes from a Big Country and A Walk in the Woods, as well as his books on the English language, such as Mother Tongue. When I first read him, he struck me as a more literate version of Dave Barry - a ve...more
First of all, this book lives up to its title. In this text we explore everything, from the beginning of time up until the beginning of human history, from the infinitely tiny hearts of quarks to the infinitely huge scale of the universe. Biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology, paleontology - whatever your science of choice is, it's in this book. And what's more, it's fun to read.
One of the things that makes Bryson an excellent writer is simply his ability to make you enjoy reading his work. He's most well known for his travel books, such as Notes from a Big Country and A Walk in the Woods, as well as his books on the English language, such as Mother Tongue. When I first read him, he struck me as a more literate version of Dave Barry - a very intelligent guy with a fantastic sense of humor. No matter what he writes, you can't help but enjoy it.
This book, then, must have been a massive challenge for him. He admits right in the beginning that, before he started this book, he pretty much had no idea what he was going to find out. He wasn't a scientist or a naturalist, and had no idea how it was that we knew, for example, that the Earth had an iron core, or how we knew that the universe was expanding or why uranium was so easy to split up. He started from a state of ignorance, and spent three years removing himself from that state.
That, in and of itself, is admirable. There seems to be an unfortunate trend in thinking that science is too hard for the normal person to understand, and in some cases that if it is indeed to hard for the normal person to understand then, why, it must be impossible to understand. Thus the whole Intelligent Designer nonsense and the continuing battles.... in the TWENTY-FIRST GODSDAMNED CENTURY.... over whether or not evolution is the process by which we can explain the fantastic diversity of life on this planet.
If you're like me, and you've been a dabbler in science for a long time, you'll still learn something new. Not the least of what you will learn is what the Greatest Scientific Minds of our Time were like as people. Bryson does his best to bring out the humanity of people like Newton, Lowell, Einstein, Kelvin and everyone else. There's a whole lot of fighting, lying, deceiving and backstabbing that brought us to where we are today, and if they had taught me that in science class when I was a kid, I probably would have gotten better grades.
If you're not a science nerd, you'll still enjoy the book. Remember - up until he wrote it, Bryson was one of you. His style is very readable, and he guides you very deftly from one topic to the next, illustrating a very important point: all science is connected. There is no discrete boundary between, say, chemistry and biology, just a fuzzy blur where we pass from one to the other. The greatest advances in our knowledge of how the universe works have come from the most unlikely places, and sometimes knowing why atoms behave the way they do can help understand why the universe behaves the way it does.
Okay, enough jabbering from me. Get the book....less
A Short History of Nearly Everything 
