★★★★☆ A Short History of Nearly Everything: 2.0, by Bill Bryson
Survey of all of science
A Short History of Nearly Everything: 2.0
Bill Bryson
Survey of all of science
I read the first edition of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything in 2004. I just read it again, because I used it in a story I am writing -- one of my characters reads it, so I needed to refresh my memory so that that character could talk about it intelligently. Since my first read this new edition has appeared: A Short History of Nearly Everything: 2.0 in 2012. This a book that I not only recommend to friends, but that I force fictional characters to read!
Although the title, "A Short History of Nearly Everything," is not inaccurate, it could, I fear, mislead some readers. The two problematic words are "short" and "history." When Bryson calls it short, he does not mean that it is, in absolute terms, a short book. It's a fairly hefty tome: 562 pages, 1.9 lb in hardback. It is short only in consideration of the material it covers, "nearly everything." Fair enough. But this is not a book you're going to read in an afternoon at the beach. (If you want that, the abridged audiobook read by Bryson himself, which clocks in at a shade under six hours, might do you.)
The word "history" would naturally make you think of the subject by that name that you learned about in high school, stories of leaders, governments, wars, and social movements, in fact the academic discipline as defined by Wikipedia. Bryson, however, is using the word much more broadly, as everything that happened in the past, beginning with the Big Bang.
In fact, the High School classes that aSHoNE will remind are those that were labeled "science." You'll get physics, cosmology, a little chemistry, geology, and biology, with, for the last, a focus on evolutionary biology, including a hefty chunk on human origins.
Bryson does an extraordinarily good job with this impossible assignment he set himself. He in fact manages to cover most of science as we currently understand it (or as we did in 2004). He is entertaining and for the most part, gets things right. Even in genetics, my area of expertise, most of my quibbles had to do with his deploying jargon incorrectly and also with the book being behind the times. (A lot has happened in genetics since 2004.)
One thing that Bryson gets right is realizing that the science, itself, is intrinsically fascinating. He tells lots of stories about the people behind the science. But he doesn't overdo it. Most popular science writers labor under the delusion that readers are uniquely interested in "yoomin stories." This is not a thing that any scientist I know believes. Most scientists think it is brilliant and interesting that continents rest on moving plates that scoot around the globe, that every galaxy has a giant black hole in its center, and that back when the atmosphere was 35% oxygen, there were dragonflies the size of serving platters zipping around, ...
Good book. If you want to convince a reader in your life that science can be interesting, you can't do much better.