A Short History of Nearly Everything Bill Bryson,
Publisher: Random House Large Print
ISBN: 0375432000
DDC: 500
Edition: Hardcover; 2003-05-06
Summary:
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 Life and 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
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