Though A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.įrom primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out.
Science has never been more involving or entertaining. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds.
To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -and, if possible, answer -the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -well, most of it. One of the world’s most beloved writers and New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body takes his ultimate journey-into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.
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