Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”
Most of my reading is usually compulsory and only rarely do I have time to sit down and read books that are not scientifically directed.
Well, here is a book I purchased this last summer and only finished now. It took me longer to finish the last 2 chapters than the rest of the book. Lately time is just too scarce…
I have to say that I loved this book. Bill Bryson’s style is just so delightful and the subject at hand is just so ample that I was curious to see how things would role out. It was a great journey right to the end.
Although I have a strong scientific background, I think this book is great for anyone that would like to know a little more about their surroundings, namely our planet Earth.
The side stories that follow along the history of science, such as the behavioral attributes of the inventors, the backstabbing, the dooms day theories and the blind annihilation of species by Man, just keep the reader turning the pages.
I definitely recommend this book to anyone with thirst for general knowledge.
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I have it on the shelf but I did not pick it up yet. Most people say it’s really interesting. I have to give it a try too.
Good to hear you gave it a thumbs up! I also have it on my shelf, which is going to collapse someday from the weight of unread books. ;)
Have a look at this!
http://pm.gov.uk/output/Page10500.asp
Thanks for the link. I found his book very fun and above all interesting to read! I recommend it to all. :)
[...] For instance, the distance between the planets is just so amazing in length that I could only explain it properly using an excerpt from Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”: Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away. [...]