Rating: 
Summary: Paradoxical Work
Review: I found the title of this book to be somewhat misleading. It should have been titled something like A Short History of the Natural Sciences or maybe even A Survey of Natural History, although that doesn't sound very catchy. Anyway, I am sure the reason it's titled like it is would be because science books don't typically sell well. By categorizing something as a "history of everything" you are covering a broad area of potential topics to lure in a broad area of readers. Cha-ching! The book itself reads like a survey textbook but more interesting. Matters discussed are the cosmos, the earth and its natural wonders, and life itself from the simplest of organisms and bacteria to Homo Sapiens. I found the book to be engaging at times because Bryson presents the material almost as if telling a story. However, in other areas I think even the most ardent reader will find the book becoming dry. This is partly due to the subject matter (It's hard to talk about fungi and lichens and make it sound interesting) and secondly because there's an abundance of facts and information overload. Bryson apparently relies on others to supply these facts since he's not a scientist himself so we have to accept the information as the provisional facts of our age. One puzzling thing I found about the book was that during the beginning to middle stages of the book Bryson builds up this almost supernatural-like awe for the amazing splendor and complexity of life and even the universe itself. I could even see atheists saying that's God doing that! However, later on he basically says it's mostly by chance and there's nothing unique about us except that we happened the way we did...and oh by the way we'll probably all be dead in a relatively short amount of geological time. Paradoxical if you ask me. Besides these confusing points the book is somewhat worthwhile because everyone who reads it is going to come away with at least something useful or if nothing else have ideas refreshed in your head so you can sound really cool while playing trivial pursuit. I would have really rated this book at 3.5 stars out of 5 but of course Amazon won't let me.
Rating: 
Summary: Mandatory Material
Review: Bryson's "Short History" should be required reading for all undergraduate students. His broad inquiry into some of the most important scientific developments in modern history should give us all pause to consider our place in the universe. One finishes this book with a greater appreciation for the incredible importance of the physical and human sciences.
Rating:
Summary: I love this book
Review: This book was great! I was so happy to have found it. Bill Bryson really helps you understand what we as people know about our environment.
Rating:
Summary: great book !
Review: I learn something new each time I pick it up. I now know a lot of amazing history and facts about our world. I can only imagine how much time and research went into writing this book.
Rating:
Summary: excellent and humourous
Review: Bryson is brilliant in his ability to convey information to the reader. A great read. This book is entertaining, humourous, and informative.
wwr@virginia.edu
Rating:
Summary: A very readable book on a VERY dry subject!
Review: This is a great read. Long but very informative and interesting finding out how one scientist's discoveries helped, or hindered, another's.Great information about scientific ideas and break throughs throughout the ages. I have used several ideas in this book in sermons. For instance: If you enlarged a single atom to the size of a cathedral the nucleus would be the size of a house fly BUT 1000 times HEAVIER than the cathedral! Our entire existance is made up of "empty" spaces! Very mind blowing stuff on what we take for granted.
Rating:
Summary: A brief blurb of just this book
Review: Put off by science or just getting into it? Seems vast, confusing, complex and tedious? Why am I rephrasing the promotional blurbs!? Well, if you are ever curious at to what makes this world tick and how, this book will tell you what similarly curious ancestors did to satisfy their curiosities. Less of a science tour (although there's plenty of that in this 500+ page book) than a tour of scientific discovery and development. It's essentially A Long Story of Scientific Research; how we got here with sprinklings of what we have here. But it's not dry. And ultimately, for its target audience, that's the right antidote.
Rating:
Summary: The better textbook
Review: I think if High School and College textbooks were this entertaining we wouldn't be so bored when we take these courses.
I loved that the book read more like a story than a telling of facts.
I would highly recommend this book to all families.
Rating:
Summary: Nearly everything or almost nothing?
Review: This is the fifth Bryson book I've read, and a wonderful addition to his diverse output. As an author, he has the ability to go from absurdly funny to sublimely ethereal. This tome represents a venture into the latter. He takes on a daunting task -- summarizing how we know what we know in the scientific world -- and makes it amazingly simple and readable... to a point. To say that this is an easy read would be misleading. More than offering page after page crammed with names and discoveries and how an idea led to another (or went unnoticed for decades), this volume shows more how luck, serendipity, and intuition play roles in the discovery process. And how little we really know. This is a useful companion to other works that point out how humankind is not necessarily the inevitable outcome of evolution and how we may, when our days are finished, be not much more than a footnote to the true history of the world.
Rating:
Summary: A journalist fascinated with the scientific method
Review: Journalist Bill Bryson got tired of not knowing things. So he took three years off to pester scientists to give him all the answers about the Universe, Life and Everything. This 500-page book is the result of his quest and a big portrait of all that we Humans know and (more importantly) don't know and how we got there. The table of contents made me laugh out loud - it so impossibly broad in its scope, ranging from Cosmology to Nuclear Physics to Biology to Geology and much more... But he somehow made it work. Bill is obviously fascinated with Science and he portrays the scientific method very clearly (plus all the backstabbing that happens when nobody is looking). The book is clear, as concise as possible and very accessible to you and me. He doesn't pretend to know all subjects and he is very candid about what he doesn't understand. What a great teacher he could be! (is?) He also happens to be a gifed and witty writer, able to keep you glued to the pages even when the subject is as dry as geology. Of course, the book is superficial but hey, it is, after all, a short history of EVERYTHING. To compensate for this, the bibliography and notes pages are very thorough and will make you shop for several other books here at Amazon.
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