| |  | Books : A Short History of Nearly Everything |  | | | | | | | | | |
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 500
EAN: 9780767908184
ISBN: 076790818X
Label: Broadway
Manufacturer: Broadway
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 560
Publication Date: September 14, 2004
Publisher: Broadway
Release Date: September 14, 2004
Sales Rank: 763
Studio: Broadway
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
One of the world’s most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey -- into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.
In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. 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. 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. 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. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. 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. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.
From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Review:
From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. 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. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. 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). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as 'The Size of the Earth' and 'Life Itself.' Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Lifeand Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it's when Bryson dives into some of science's best and most embarrassing fights--Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould--that he finds literary gold. --Therese Littleton
Customer Reviews Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Not really short, nor about everything, but worth the effort
This book is quite different from Bryson's usual fare. Here Bryson steps out of his usual travel and language focus to write about science. The product is an interesting combination of the social history of science, biographies of famous scientists, and discussion of significant scientific discoveries in very accessible language. What science does Bryson cover, you might ask? This is where "everything" comes in to the picture. Bryson has chosen a wide range of scientific discoveries, from working ... Read More
Rating:  - like drinking out of a fire hose
Great book with broad coverage of history and science. not a quick read. You need to have your brain awake and engaged while reading.
Rating: - Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson narrates a brief yet epic journey of everything from the nothingness of which the universe sprang, to the development of technologies that only a handful of people on our planet understand in one of his best-selling books, A Short History of Nearly Everything. From the top of the world's tallest mountains to the bottom of the deepest petrie dish, Bryson tells the tale of nearly every event that has shaped the universe and the people that unlocked those mysteries. By rejecting the standard ... Read More
Rating:  - Decent overview of the sciences
This is a good overview of the fundamentals of science.It meanders through astronomy, chemistry, physics, biology, geology, and paleontology and is very well written.Through Bryson's style, you can tell that he enjoys the subject matter.The "History" part of the title refers to both history in the sense of the universe, but also the history of the bright individuals and their insights that have allowed us to know that history.
What makes this book distinct is that Bryson was not too ... Read More
Rating: - ALMOST EVERYTHING
It's a tough call trying to squeeze earth's history into approximately 450 pages, but Bill Bryson has done it. With his trademark gentle humour and a focus on making even the most complex subjects (such as the nature dark matter and our evolution from chimp to Homo sapien) easy to grasp, Bryson has created a thoroughly readable and more importantly, enjoyable, book.
I am no science whiz, and I will freely admit that there were certain topics that confused me or just didn't hold my attention (for ... Read More
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