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A
Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of
Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out.
To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of
sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various
fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks
and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand
the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With
his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. Though
A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same
material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly
detailed novel (albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted
to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters
are grouped into larger sections such as "The Size of the Earth" and "Life
Itself." Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Life
and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it's when Bryson
dives into some of science's best and most embarrassing fights--Cope vs.
Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould--that he finds literary gold. --Therese
Littleton - Amazon.com
Hardcover from Broadway
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Notes
From A Big Country
by Bill Bryson
Hardcover from Doubleday Canada
Out of Print |
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A
Walk in the Woods : Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
by Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson has made a living out of traveling and then writing about
it. In The Lost Continent he re-created the road trips of his childhood;
in Neither Here nor There he retraced the route he followed as a young
backpacker traversing Europe. When this American transplant to Britain
decided to return home, he made a farewell walking tour of the British
countryside and produced Notes from a Small Island. Once back on American
soil and safely settled in New Hampshire, Bryson once again hears the siren
call of the open road--only this time it's a trail. The Appalachian Trail,
to be exact. In A Walk in the Woods Bill Bryson tackles what is, for him,
an entirely new subject: the American wilderness. Accompanied only by his
old college buddy Stephen Katz, Bryson starts out one March morning in
north Georgia, intending to walk the entire 2,100 miles to trail's end
atop Maine's Mount Katahdin.
If nothing else, A Walk in the Woods is proof positive that the journey
is the destination. As Bryson and Katz haul their out-of-shape, middle-aged
butts over hill and dale, the reader is treated to both a very funny personal
memoir and a delightful chronicle of the trail, the people who created
it, and the places it passes through. Whether you plan to make a trip like
this one yourself one day or only care to read about it, A Walk in the
Woods is a great way to spend an afternoon. --Alix Wilber - Amazon.com
Paperback from Broadway
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