Country: U.S.A
Genre: Non-Fiction/Popular Science
Pages: 624 (Paperback)/6 hours (Audiobook)
A few months ago, I didn't even know who Bill Bryson was. I first heard of him through one of my favorite bloggers, Alley, from What Red Read. She is a convinced Bryson-ite. Whenever somebody is gung-ho for a writers that doesn't target teenagers for primary audience, I want to read him. So I thought I should check him out. What tipped the scale though was a discussion I had with my martial arts coach, who said he was listening to the audiobook of A Short History Of Nearly Everything in his car. I decided then to take on Audible's generous offer to send me a free audiobook if I tried out their web site for two weeks. Well, to say the truth, I tried them for maybe twenty-four hours before cancelling my membership, but it was worth it. Bill Bryson is like that Sunday evening television host who wants to teach you a thing or two about everything while you're still awake.
First let me say that A Short History Of Nearly Everything is not the correct title for this book. It's not accurate enough. It should be something like A Rather Exhaustive Story Of Phenomenological Self-Awareness, but it wouldn't sell. Life as we know it on Earth is the biggest unsolved mystery in the history of humanity. Bryson doesn't have any pretension to resolve it, but in his book he's looking to explain how we came to understand life through the evolution of sciences. And he takes a methodical approach. From the super-giant, the formation of the universe, to the super-miniature. The evolution of bacteriologic life into human existence. In between, there is us. Bill Bryson made me feel pretty small for a few hours. I don't know if it was his goal, but that's what happened.
As I'm not the most well-versed in chemistry, micro-biology and all those earthly preoccupations, the first part of Bryson's book was the most interesting to me. Astronomy, the creation of the universe and the history of Earth's situation in the cosmic landscape. It's about two hours, one third of the book. Since the beginning of science, the realm of human knowledge and awareness of its surrounding has grown smaller and smaller. Things we know, from outside the range of human built telescopes, are based on mathematical calculations, on human assumptions of a set of known values. I'm not the biggest mathematics enthusiast, but this is how I understood it. As science and knowledge evolves, the unknown evolves too. As a faster pace. To help visualizing this, Thomas Kuhn had an interesting model. Picture science as a circle. Whenever there's something outside the circle, the circle itself grows and there's a lot of parallel knowledge gain. And the understanding of what's outside human reach grows even more.
A Short History Of Nearly Everything is a gold mine of information that will make you look brilliant in various parties and discussions about the meaning of life. It's organized in order of subject size (from universe to bacterias) and by discipline (astronomy, chemistry, micro-biology, paleontology, etc.) but it felt like Bryson was throwing random facts by the handful at some times. It became confusing at times, but Bryson's approach worked very well overall. He keeps you in the loop and keeps his objective in sight at all times. The phenomenological history of human existence. While the subjects cover such a wide landscape of interest and can sometimes confuse you, Bryson keeps things seductive at all times. That's what good popularizers do. They democratize knowledge. What he might lack in structure, he has the edge of keeping his points interesting and not stall over details. A great read, or should I say listening.