"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson

 Review by Madeline Salmon

 I'm bending my own rules by reviewing this national bestseller from 2003, but I think enough years have passed since the publication of Bill Bryson's fascinating and charming tale of our universe.

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bryson undertakes a feat just as monumental as the book's title suggests. He takes us on a tour of all the major scientific fields, from geology to physics to chemistry to astronomy to biology. What he doesn't do is bore us.

Bryson's real stroke of genius is his decision to tell the story of science through the history of how it was discovered. Rather than telling us just how gravity works, for example, he tells us the story of its discovery as a force, and along the way we learn that Edmond Halley did almost everything except discover the comet that's named after him, and Sir Isaac Newton was absolutely mental and believed in alchemy as fervently as science. Only Bryson would have the patience and wit to find and relate such details as geology giant Charles Lyell's habit of taking up such strange positions in furniture that his colleagues worried about him.

The first part of the book (including the sections on astronomy, geology, paleontology, and physics) is the best. I didn't love Bryson's lengthy account of biology, although I could just be sick of the subject, having reluctantly majored in it. But I also think the characters just aren't as interesting. The characters (I shouldn't call them that--they're real people, though it's hard to remember at times) are the real reason to read A Short History of Nearly Everything. The book says much more about people than it does about science, whether that was Bryson's intention or not.

That doesn't mean to say I didn't learn any science--I did, but most of what I learned tells me that it's more fluid than we like to think. It's amazing that a nine-year-old book can be dated, but the world of science moves quickly. Bryson discusses Pluto as a planet (I mourned in silence for the lost little space rock of my youth as I read those passages) and there are probably other obsolete references, but since this is a general overview of science and not a detailed review of any one field, I think most of the information is safe to believe. Just remember, though: if Bryson's great-to-the-ninth-power-grandchild writes a similar book in another millennium, they'll all be laughing at the things we held as gospel truth.

Don't let the scientific jargon or the high page count turn you off of this book. It's a fun read from cover to cover, and it will teach you something, whether you stopped taking science after ninth grade principles of biology or you have a doctorate in particle physics.