|
| A Really Short History of Nearly Everything | 
| Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Category: Book
This item is no longer available
Avg. Customer Rating:  621 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0385666861
EAN: 9780385666862
ASIN: 0385666861
Publication Date: October 28, 2008 (In 53 Days)
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
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’s own fascination with science began with a battered old school book he had when he was about ten or eleven years old. It had an illustration that captivated him–a diagram showing Earth’s interior as it would look if you cut into it with a large knife and removed about a quarter of its bulk. The idea of lots of startled cars and people falling off the edge of that sudden cliff (and 4,000 miles is a pretty long way to fall) was what grabbed him in the beginning, but gradually his attention turned to what the picture was trying to teach him: namely that Earth’s interior is made up of several different layers of materials, and at the very centre is a glowing sphere of iron and nickel,
as hot as the Sun’s surface, according to the caption. And he very clearly remembers thinking: “How do they know that?”
Bill’s storytelling skill makes the “How?” and, just as importantly, the “Who?” of scientific discovery entertaining and accessible for all ages. He covers the wonder and mystery of time and space, the frequently bizarre and often obsessive scientists and the methods they used, and the mind-boggling fact that, somehow, the universe exists and against all odds, life came to be on this wondrous planet we call home.
Download Description
Bill Bryson is one of the world's most beloved and bestselling writers. In A Short History of Nearly Everything, he takes his ultimate journey—into the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer. It's a dazzling quest, the intellectual odyssey of a lifetime, as this insatiably curious writer attempts to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. Or, as the author puts it, "...how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since." This is, in short, a tall order. To that end, Bill Bryson apprenticed himself to a host of the world's most profound scientific minds, living and dead. His challenge is to take subjects like geology, chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people, like himself, made bored (or scared) stiff of science by school. His interest is not simply to discover what we know but to find out how we know it. How do we know what is in the center of the earth, thousands of miles beneath the surface? How can we know the extent and the composition of the universe, or what a black hole is? How can we know where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through space and time, Bill Bryson encounters a splendid gallery of the most fascinating, eccentric, competitive, and foolish personalities ever to ask a hard question. In their company, he undertakes a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only this superb writer can render it. Science has never been more involving, and the world we inhabit has never been fuller of wonder and delight.
“Stylish [and] stunningly accurate prose. We learn what the material world is like from the smallest quark to the largest galaxy and at all the levels in between... brims with strange and amazing facts... destined to become a modern classic of science writing.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES “Bryson has made a career writing hilarious travelogues, and in many ways his latest is more of the same, except that this time Bryson hikes through the world of science.”
PEOPLE “Bryson is surprisingly precise, brilliantly eccentric and nicely eloquent... a gifted storyteller has dared to retell the world’s biggest story.”
SEATTLE TIMES “Hefty, highly researched and eminently readable.”
SIMON WINCHESTER, THE GLOBE AND MAIL “All non-scientists (and probably many specialized scientists, too) can learn a great deal from his lucid and amiable explanations.”
NATIONAL POST "Bryson is a terrific stylist. You can’t help but enjoy his writing, for its cheer and buoyancy, and for the frequent demonstration of his peculiar, engaging turn of mind.”
OTTAWA CITIZEN “Wonderfully readable. It is, in the best sense, learned.”
WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 616 more reviews...
 Delightful September 4, 2008
Instantly one of my favorite books. My daughter taught English at Columbia and introduced me to this author. Who else could make geology and anthropology interesting and fun. No one I know. A great read that leaves you smarter.
excellent September 1, 2008
wonderful book, both educational and entertaining. It's one you can read over and over. There is so much information that it is really not possible to remember it all but it is delightful to read.
A valuable service to society - don't quibble over facts August 27, 2008
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I'm not normally a "deep" reader, so I really appreciated Mr. Bryson's effort to make these subjects more accessible. In fact, after reading this, I was inspired to take another look at some of the more challenging titles in this genre. Therein is the real value of this book, from my perspective. He opens a door to us who tend to be a bit intimidated by the scholarly tomes about such topics as the life-cycle of a proton. Maybe we just need a little encouragement to dig a bit deeper. Those who focus on pointing out factual mistakes are missing the point.
 The history of our world for dummies August 17, 2008
Bryson does a great job of compiling a huge amount of information into a mere 475 pages. It is well organized, easy to read, and surprisingly enjoyable considering the complexity of certain topics. While some subjects, like geology, microbiology and atomic structure were a bit tedious, I really enjoyed reading about astronomy and especially anthropology (my favorite class in college). This comprehensive book embarks upon the history of the world we live in, from the nothingness of a pre-Big Bang universe, to the atoms that compose everything, to the primordial soup that yielded life, and to our most ancient hominid ancestors. What makes this book work is not that Bryson presents the history of nearly everything, but how these everythings were discovered. He investigates the history of exploration and narrates how scientists discovered answers to some of the most fundamental questions pertaining to who we are and how we came to be (especially during the 18th and 19th centuries). Bryson's goal was to fulfill his readers in ways that textbooks never did and he did that in an entertaining and often humorous way. For someone like me who often cringes at the mention of certain science topics (physics, chemistry), Bryson's delivery felt comfortable and was not intimidating. Best of all, Bryson left me with awe and wonder at the sequence of events that led our planet to enable our existence.
 Interesting but not up to my expectations August 14, 2008
The book covers the history of several scientific areas and tries to tell a coherent story covering the most important discoveries. Most chapters give interesting information, but sometimes the historic trivia outnumber the scientific facts and figures. Chapters 4-5-6 are long winded and almost caused me to stop reading (they definitely need rewriting!). The second half of the book (biology, anthropology) has sounder foundations and is better argumented. It is certainly an interesting work for later reference and it gives an interesting and very extensive bibliography. Some of the conclusions are biased or lack correct arguments (especially where physics is involved, it often comes down to popular talking rahter than correctly argumented science, so in the end you learn nothing new). All in all a book worth reading and owning but a little disappointing, considering the enormous expectations formed by some reviews.
|
|
|
Wildlife, nature and the Environment
Sponsored Links
Learn how to get your own Amazon Book shop | |
