A Short History of Nearly Everything

Preview

There is a special kind of wonder that begins with a very ordinary question. How did we get here. Not just you and me, but mountains, oceans, atoms, stars, microbes, mammoths, and the strange upright creatures who spend so much time worrying about taxes and trimming hedges. A Short History of Nearly Everything sets out to answer that gigantic question in the friendliest possible way. It is a book about everything, which is of course an absurdly ambitious thing to attempt, and that is part of the charm. Rather than pretending the world is neat and fully understood, it delights in showing how astonishing, accidental, and often baffling it all is. What makes the journey so inviting is that it begins from a very human position. The narrator is not a grand scientist explaining matters from a mountaintop. He is a curious outsider, someone who once looked at a picture of the Earth hanging in a classroom and was struck by how incredible it was that any of this existed at all. That feeling never really leaves. It becomes the engine of the whole book. Bill Bryson does not simply present facts. He goes after the stories behind the facts, the odd personalities, the mistakes, the rivalries, the wild guesses, and the moments of luck that shaped what we know. So this is not merely a tour through astronomy, geology, chemistry, paleontology, biology, and physics, though it is certainly all of that. It is also a history of people trying to make sense of reality with limited tools and often comically limited information. We meet brilliant obsessives who classify rocks until they ruin their health, gentlemen scientists who blow themselves up with their own experiments, explorers who trudge into terrible places in search of a bone or a beetle, and...