A must read for nearly everyone

One of my favorite books is written by one of my favorite authors: Bill Bryson. The book is called A Short History of Nearly Everything, which is rather ambitious, because how can one book contain the history of nearly everything? Well, it can’t, for a fact. The title is a typical Bill Bryson joke. Bryson’s writing is full of humor, little linguistic jokes and sarcasm (often directed at himself). I haven’t read his latest publications (At Home, for example), but based on what I have read I think that the Short History is his most informed book. Other books of his that I love are In The Woods (a hilarious diary kind of book on how he hiked the Appalachian Trail) and Neither Here Nor There (in which he writes about his travels around Europe). 

But lets get back to the book that this post is about. If A Short History isn’t a history about everything, then what is it? The book aims to give the general reader an idea of science: earth, space, how humans got into being, and all this without getting too complicated. Bryson himself is an alpha-educated man and he thought that it should be possible for alpha’s to ‘understand’ a little of science as well. Most of the science schoolbooks are incomprehensible according to Bryson: “It was as if [the textbook writer] wanted to keep the good stuff secret by making all of it soberly unfathomable.”

This book was a fountain of knowledge for me. It taught me so much of the cosmos, planets, atoms, bacteria, molecules, life, how humans got into existence. And it’s all written in the Bryson-way: accessible and full with humor. A subject like this can seem daunting, but it’s not. It’s fun; Bryson made it fun! I can only imagine how many years of research this must have taken him. 

The only problem was: I didn’t have the book. I read the pocket-edition back in 2007, while I was on vacation in Southern France. I devoured the book and finished it in just a couple of days. I had borrowed it from someone else, so I had to give it back. I wanted to buy the illustrated edition for myself, but as it is a quite expensive book I was in doubt about it. Eventually I forgot about it. In the meantime, I bought loads of other books instead. 

I got a lot of book tokens for my last birthday and I remembered that I wanted to buy the book, so at last I am the proud owner of A Short History of Nearly Everything. Getting the book was not easy. I went to Amsterdam, thinking that it would be easy to get there. The first three bookstores didn’t have it in stock. The last one finally had the book…in Dutch. I hate translated books, it’s impossible to translate all of Bryson’s clever jokes. Luckily, I saw the English version in a corner. It was a little damaged, but I got 10% discount so I decided to go for it. And now that I am re-reading it, I’m loving it even more. 

It’s a beautiful book, I love the typography and all the great pictures in it. It’s really a lot more fun to read than the pocket version. Recommended for nearly everyone!