Book 79: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

One of the challenging aspects of attempting to read a certain number of books per week is that some books are obviously going to take much more time than that. This book is one of them. 

I've read a number of other books by Bryson; his books on travel are delightful and well-known for a reason, and I really enjoyed his short biography on Shakespeare, as well. This book is ambitious on a whole other level. It's a book that manages to be both an overview of a wide number of scientific concepts and also the history of science: how we know what we do (and what we don't know). The focus on how we discovered and expanded upon (and also were proven completely wrong) scientific knowledge gives a context to many scientific principles that I hadn't thought about since I was in high school. His writing is crisp and clear and entertaining, and he is extremely good at telling the story rather than listing dry facts. 

The book was unsurprisingly a combination of a review of things I had once known and a completely new exploration of other topics that I had never learned (or had forgotten completely). Beyond the big names like Newton and Darwin and Einstein, I was fairly unfamiliar with the biographies of many of the scientists who were so influential. One aspect about those biographies that I loved was the revelation of how much we know as a result of longstanding feuds between individuals who were driven by little more than spite. On the other hand, I found myself newly enraged at the constant dismissal of women scientists by their peers and the institutions and organizations of their disciplines for centuries. Bryson certainly doesn't skip over this reality, but it made me want to read a book just like this one that only focused on the contributions of women to scientific discovery that have been neglected and ignored and deliberately hidden for far too long. 

I bought this book almost ten years ago while I was in Germany, but somehow never got around to reading it until now. I'm glad I finally did. 

Grade: A