A Short History of Nearly Everything

Publisher and industry reviews

UK Kirkus review

If you only know Bill Bryson as the author of amusing but essentially lightweight travelogues, prepare to be amazed. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his Sisyphean quest to understand everything that has ever happened, from the Big Bang via creation and evolution to the rise of human civilization. Bryson takes the kind of mind-boggling subjects that bore the pants off the average reader - geology, chemistry, particle physics, DNA - and miraculously renders them not only comprehensible but engaging, even (God forbid) fun. That he does so without ever seeming trite or simplistic says a great deal for Bryson's skill as a writer, and reveals hitherto unimagined depths of seriousness (remember, this is the man who single-handedly invented literary travel-lite). Of course, A Short History is still a travel book, of sorts. It merely replaces the coastal paths of Britain, the Appalachian Trial and the Australian Outback with the vast, awe-inspiring landscapes of time and space. It's not surprising, then, that Bryson took three years 'finding saintly, patient experts prepared to answer a lot of outstandingly dumb questions'. As with his other books, Bryson presents a splendid parade of characters, dead and alive, by turns obsessive, competitive, foolish and plain eccentric (like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish, who worked out how much the earth weighed but didn't bother to tell anyone). No doubt some spoilsports and naysayers will query whether there is really anything new in here - to which Bryson has the perfect answer. As the physicist Leo Szilard remarked, apropos his unpublished diary, 'I am going to record the facts for the information of God.... He knows the facts, but He doesn't know this version of the facts.' You would be well advised to familiarise yourself with Bryson's version of events. (Kirkus UK)

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