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A Short History of Nearly Everything |  | Author: Bill Bryson
Creator: William Roberts
Publisher: BBC Audiobooks Ltd
Buy New: $78.79
as of 11/22/2009 17:02 CST details
New (1) Used (3) from $78.79
Seller: any_book
Rating:  711 reviews
Sales Rank: 2665153
Media: Audio Cassette
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 5.5 x 4.3 x 2.7
ISBN: 0754075958
Dewey Decimal Number: 509
EAN: 9780754075950
ASIN: 0754075958
Publication Date: October 7, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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 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
Product Description
Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. This book is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through time and space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 711
 My Desert Island Book November 20, 2009
Nautiknitter (CA)
Bryson's sparkling style cinches this as one of my top 10 books ever. It seems some scientific types are upset that Bryson delves into the lives of scientists making discoveries more than the discoveries themselves. This is his brilliance! If I want to learn everything there is to know about any given scientific discovery (I don't), I can go read the discoverer's undoubtedly dry treatise on it. I'd much rather learn about how this person came to make such a discovery. It's called human interest, which is something Bryson excels at.
 Simple, but Good November 18, 2009
Benaiah Edwards (Monterey, CA USA)
A very curt and well-presented glimpse of what science has taught us. Recommend this for any non-scientist who is curious and all young and aspiring scientists.
Very enjoyable! Absorbing topics, well written November 18, 2009
S. Eggers (Seattle, WA)
Bill Bryson is an incredibly engaging and charming writer, so he could have written a book of carpet samples and made it interesting. Combine his talents with a smorgasboard of science and history -- all about where we came from and why we think we know what we do -- and you get an irresistible book.
My only complaint was that my interests weren't *exactly* aligned with his, so I felt like too much time was spent on taxonomy (classifying everything from animals and rocks to geological epochs) at the expense of more theoretical sciences like physics and biochemistry. "Cosmos" is much more satisfying in that respect. But a perfect alignment of interests can't really be expected in a book of such broad scope, and it was still a lot of fun.
A Must Read November 13, 2009
The Reading Addict
Too many are ignorant of the wonders of scientific developments. Bill Bryson makes the story of our lives a fascinating and enjoyable tale; one from which anyone will gain. His humor and incredibly thorough research makes this book one of the most worthwhile I have read in a long while. It was amazing to find myself laughing out loud during an otherwise thoughtful scientific dissertation. Encourage your students, children and friends to read this.
Required Reading November 7, 2009
Terry P. Rizzuti (Colorado)
This is absolutely one of the best books I've ever read. It should be translated into every language and made required reading in every high school in the world. A supurb piece of work that the author should be proud of.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 711
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