At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Even his command of languages was only partial: although he could read them flawlessly, he used his own made-up pronunciations, which no one who spoke the languages could actually understand.

If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly.

Edison’s family was also in Canada till shortly before he was born. It is interesting to consider how different North American history might have been if Edison and Bell had both stayed north of the border and done their inventing there.

Because of the impossibility of achieving perfection in storage, hygiene regulations in most places allow up to two fecal pellets per pint of grain—a thought to bear in mind the next time you look at a loaf of whole grain bread.

The world has far more bats than most people realize. In fact, about a quarter of all mammal species—some eleven hundred in all—are bats.