Book description
Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when
he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his
curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly
Everything is his quest to find out everything that has happened from
the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there,
being nothing at all, to here, being us.
Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the
pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics,
and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to
people who have never thought they could be interested in science.
It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we
know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a
black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How
did anyone ever figure these things out?
On his travels through time and space, he encounters a splendid
collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and
foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked
out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never
bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. In the company of
such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the
ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of
us have never seen it before.
Bill Bryson is much loved for his bestselling travel books, from
The Lost Continent to Down Under, but Notes from a Small
Island has earned a particularly special place in the nation's
heart (a national poll for World Book Day in 2003 voted it the book
that best represents Britain). His acclaimed A Short History of
Nearly Everything won the Aventis Prize for Science Books and
the Descartes Science Communication Prize.
He has now returned to live in the UK with his wife and family.
www. billbryson. co. uk
