Reader's Diary #490- Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything

Friend and fellow blogger Barbara Bruederlin (aka The Bad Tempered Zombie) has been trying to finish this one for four years. She claims to enjoy it and understand it, just inexplicably hasn't finished it. Our mutual friend Allison (aka Flying Buttress) recently revealed the same. I can now prove, once and for all, that I am better than they. In your face, ladies.

This has been my first experience with Bill Bryson and I'll definitely be back. I found a Short History of Nearly Everything to be witty, understandable, and well-constructed. It wasn't, however, what I thought it would be.

Despite its popularity, I knew very little about the book. Given the title, I was expecting to get a lot of stuff about past wars, religion, politics and the like. But it's really a short history of nearly all the sciences. Beginning at the beginning, if there actually was a beginning, Bryson discusses the origins of the universe, the origins of the Earth, the origins of life, and the origin of us.

I loved his knack of putting things into perspective. Probably this stems from his non-science background. I imagine that the real scientists are so used to working with their numbers and figures that they have no idea how meaningless all those facts can be to the layperson. Look at the way he describes the distance between the Earth, Jupiter and Pluto:

On a diagram of the solar system drawn to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 meters away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometers distant (and about the size of a bacterium so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway.)

He goes beyond the simple stating of distance and really makes one appreciate it.

I also quite enjoyed the way he personalized the scientists. I'm not sure why this made their science all the more interesting, but it did. All the animosities and eccentricities, I guess it just made me appreciate that anything got done at all.

Then there was the wry wit. This is one of my favourite examples from the book:

In the late summer or early autumn of 1859, Whitwell Elwin, editor of the respected British journal the Quarterly Review, was sent an advance copy of a new book [On the Origin of Species] by the naturalist Charles Darwn. Elwin read the book with interest, and agreed that it had merit, but feared that the subject matter was too narrow to attract a wide audience. He urged Darwin to write a book about pigeons instead. "Everyone is interested in pigeons," he remarked helpfully.

I'd also say A Short History of Nearly Everything is the perfect length. At 574 pages before end notes, I'm sure many people would suggest he'd barely scratched the surface of scientific research. To phrase it the way Bryson might, you'd have to add about 75,000 "Short"s to the title, to get a sense of how little he actually covered in such a small space. However, I did find it just bordering on overwhelming towards the end. One of his descriptions at around page 500 made me think of ants and how we've all been told that they are so strong, it would be like one of us lifting a school bus over our heads. Yes, it's fascinating, but what have we ever done with that information? Really, I could probably have more conversations with people just by learning the names of Angelina Jolie's kids. I quickly recovered by imagining those conversations, but I knew the book had to wrap up fast.