From the Big Bang to today, science through history stories, which is so easy to read it becomes both fun and compulsive. With the addition of some glorious illustrations, it becomes even more entertaining and a stunning gift.
A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us.
His challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out?
On his travels through time and space, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.
'Deserves to sell as many copies as there are protons in the full stop that ends this review (at least 500,000,000,000).' Craig Brown,Mail on Sunday
'A thoroughly enjoyable, as well as educational, experience. Nobody who reads it will ever look at the world in the same way again' William Hartston Daily Express
The amount of ground covered is truly impressive…it's hard to imagine a better rough guide to science' John Waller Guardian
‘Brims with strange and amazing facts…destined to become a modern classic of science writing’ Ed Regis New York Times Book Review
Author
About Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. He settled in England in 1977, and lived for many years with his English wife and four children in North Yorkshire. He and his family then moved to America for a few years but have now returned to the UK. He is the bestselling author of The Lost Continent, Mother Tongue, Neither Here Nor There, Made in America, Notes From a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, Notes From a Big Country, Down Under and, most recently, A Short History of Nearly Everything. He is also the author of the bestselling African Diary (a charity book for CARE International).
