A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson


This is one of those books that deliver, on what it promises on the cover page. A Short history of EVERYTHING. "Everything" is highlighted in the last sentence for a reason, because the book is indeed so exhaustive that there is hardly any area in the Physical sciences whose history and present state is not quite touched by Bryson.

From cosmology, physics, oceanography, chemistry, biology, geology, anthropology, paleontology, climatology, botany, and evolution he covers all of these and much more.

I would not attempt to write a complete review of this book as I don't quite think I can better the one written here.

You can also have a look here for a transcript of good Q & A interview with Bill Bryson on this book.

One repetitive comment that you would see in all these reviews is on the ease and manner in which Bryson conveys SCALE, be it the scale of time /life of the earth, or interplanetary distances, or intermolecular/atomic distances. Some of these examples of scale can be seen here.

As usual this book again follows the Bill Bryson standard of not using any pictures at all, I guess when If you as as comfortable using text, you don't need to use pictures to illustrate what you mean. Words themselves crystallize into pictures. Amazon has some 45 overwhelmingly positive reviews of this book, by far the most I have ever seen and its not as though he is writing about some more interesting topics like "Sex".

This is a book with ENDURING VALUE, meaning there is so much interesting and relevant info in it that it can be read over and over again.

To put it in one sentence, If textbook writers could write science as well as Bill Bryson, I would have become a scientist!