A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson

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Book Summary Information

• Blue and white hardcover with gilt lettering. Dark blue jacket with picture
• if tge earth. White lettering. 544 pages

Book Reviews of A Short History of Nearly Everything

Book Review: Improbable!
Summary: 5 Stars

"If your two parents hadn't bonded just when they did -- possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond -- you wouldn't be here. And if their parents hadn't bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn't be here either....Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up.... If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived. Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that ..." (Well, I'll not disclose that here, but save it for your reading enjoyment.)

Also improbable are the countless scientific endeavors and inquiries over the last few hundred years, described in wonderfully colorful detail by our author. Kelvin, Count Rumford, Einstein, Mendeleyev, the Leakeys, Linnaeus, Darwin, Cavendish, Newton, Feynman...these are but a few of the famous scientific minds about which Bryson elaborates. We learn that Newton stuck a needle into his eye socket just to find out what would happen, that astronomer Edwin Hubble was a lifelong egotist and liar, that many would-be Nobel Prize winners had fame snatched out of their grasp by unlucky happenstance or pluckier rivals, and though Caspar Wistar devoted his life to the study of dinosaur bones, he is remembered chiefly for the flowering shrub wisteria named for him by his botantist friend, Thomas Nuttall.

The nineteenth century seemed replete with colorful characters sometimes masquerading as scientists, sometimes solving complex riddles. Among the many oddities and unique personalities portrayed by Bryson: The nitrous oxide inhaling devotees of the Askesian Society, the archeologist who preferred doing his fieldwork "au naturel", the astronomers who traveled for years only to miss the marvelous celestial happenstance due to a cloud, and the geologist who would slump to rest his head on chairseats while standing. Always, Bryson injects fascinating asides, strange coincidences, and the most arcane and useful detail. He does it all with the eye of a terribly interested observer, but not without a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek humor.

He closes one chapter that details just how much there is yet to learn about the earth's flora and fauna with a question posed to Richard Fortey at the Natural History Museum in London. " `And I suppose that's why you value someone who spends forty-two years studying a single species of plant, even if it doesn't produce anything terribly new?' `Precisely,' he said, `precisely.' And he really seemed to mean it."

The fantastic narrative artfully weaves in and around the truly astounding facts of our universe, solar system, planet, life-forms, cells, and molecules. Bryson begins the book with an explanation that he has found school textbooks far too dry and their exponential numbering conventions incomprehensible. He avoids this by a longshot, bringing the numbers alive, always referencing how many `thousand million,' or `million billion' that comprise a large number. His descriptions of size, from the unapproachable vastness of our universe to the unseen smallnesses of cells, proteins and molecules, are nearly always accompanied by analogy. If the sun is as large as that depicted in most textbooks, then a true-to-scale solar system has Pluto, not on the foldout leaf, but as an unseeable microbe, several miles from the book. If you unraveled the DNA found packed into any one of the billions of molecules that comprise you, it would stretch out six feet. This is the stuff of which great cocktail party factoids are made!

This is the best book I have read since the hugely popular John Adams by McCullough came out several years ago. The level of research alone is astounding. Bryson seems to have culled everything that ever was chronicled. Although I am as far from being a scientist as we are to reaching the edge of the universe (discussed by Bryson, of course), I heartily recommend this book. Improbably.

Summary of A Short History of Nearly Everything

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