![]() ![]() In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail - well, most of it. One of the world's most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey - into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer. ![]() But it's when Bryson dives into some of science's best and most embarrassing fights-Cope vs. Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as "The Size of the Earth" and "Life Itself." Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Life and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. Though A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. ![]()
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