Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful Science at its Best
Review: Any book by Bill Bryson is a delight to read. "A Short History of Nearly Everything" readily fits this bill.Bryson shows a child like joy in uncovering any thing new. This book is full of interesting pieces which Bryson is only too happy to share with his readers. Bryson succeeds in making science readable. Popular science has rarely had a better communicator. From another perspective, this is the sort of book that all believers in "creation science" should read. It keeps the scale of the earth and its occupants in true perspective to the universe. If there are 140 billion galaxies, how was all this made in seven days? I recommend this book to all thoughtful and inquiring minds. Read and enjoy its many pleasures.
Rating:
Summary: This is simply Bryson at his best
Review: This is simply Bryson at his best - making complex subjects such as astronomy and the mysteries of cosmology intelligible to mere historians and people in the humanities like me. This is well worth the read - more so I think than some of his other books, since the jokes were beginning to pall. (What is wrong with Des Moines, after all...) Christopher Catherwood, author of CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS AND ISLAMIC RAGE (Zondervan, 2003)
Rating: 
Summary: History of Scientific Discovery
Review: This is a serious work, but Bill Bryson still focuses on the ironies and foibles of the people who advanced scientific thought over the centuries, unearthing lots of interesting bits of trivia and history. An engaging book that would be a good companion piece for a survey course in the hard sciences.
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Summary: Everything you thought you knew, but didn't...
Review: This exceptionally well-written and entertaining history of the physical world, and all that surrounds it, should be mandatory reading for everybody. Bryson causes the reader to appreciate the wonder of physical science and those who discovered its mysteries.
Rating:
Summary: Top 5 List
Review: This book provides a fantastic overview of both the history of discovery and the information learned. It covers a multitude of scientific fields, from their origins to prevailing (and often disputed) beliefs. Contrary to most scientific text books, however, Bryson makes it all understandable amd mostly memorable. After reading, it is impossible to look at our physical surroundings the same way. Excellent read.
Rating:
Summary: Improbable!
Review: The number of times author Bill Bryson uses this adjective in 478 pages must approach Avogadro's Number. For how else to describe life on earth? It IS improbable! Bryson brilliantly brings out the sheer absurdity of our being here. "If your two parents hadn't bonded just when they did -- possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond -- you wouldn't be here. And if their parents hadn't bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn't be here either....Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up.... If you go back sixty-four generations, to the time of the Romans, the number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived. Clearly something has gone wrong with our math here. The answer, it may interest you to learn, is that ..." (Well, I'll not disclose that here, but save it for your reading enjoyment.) Also improbable are the countless scientific endeavors and inquiries over the last few hundred years, described in wonderfully colorful detail by our author. Kelvin, Count Rumford, Einstein, Mendeleyev, the Leakeys, Linnaeus, Darwin, Cavendish, Newton, Feynman...these are but a few of the famous scientific minds about which Bryson elaborates. We learn that Newton stuck a needle into his eye socket just to find out what would happen, that astronomer Edwin Hubble was a lifelong egotist and liar, that many would-be Nobel Prize winners had fame snatched out of their grasp by unlucky happenstance or pluckier rivals, and though Caspar Wistar devoted his life to the study of dinosaur bones, he is remembered chiefly for the flowering shrub wisteria named for him by his botantist friend, Thomas Nuttall. The nineteenth century seemed replete with colorful characters sometimes masquerading as scientists, sometimes solving complex riddles. Among the many oddities and unique personalities portrayed by Bryson: The nitrous oxide inhaling devotees of the Askesian Society, the archeologist who preferred doing his fieldwork "au naturel", the astronomers who traveled for years only to miss the marvelous celestial happenstance due to a cloud, and the geologist who would slump to rest his head on chairseats while standing. Always, Bryson injects fascinating asides, strange coincidences, and the most arcane and useful detail. He does it all with the eye of a terribly interested observer, but not without a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek humor. He closes one chapter that details just how much there is yet to learn about the earth's flora and fauna with a question posed to Richard Fortey at the Natural History Museum in London. " 'And I suppose that's why you value someone who spends forty-two years studying a single species of plant, even if it doesn't produce anything terribly new?' 'Precisely,' he said, 'precisely.' And he really seemed to mean it." The fantastic narrative artfully weaves in and around the truly astounding facts of our universe, solar system, planet, life-forms, cells, and molecules. Bryson begins the book with an explanation that he has found school textbooks far too dry and their exponential numbering conventions incomprehensible. He avoids this by a longshot, bringing the numbers alive, always referencing how many 'thousand million,' or 'million billion' that comprise a large number. His descriptions of size, from the unapproachable vastness of our universe to the unseen smallnesses of cells, proteins and molecules, are nearly always accompanied by analogy. If the sun is as large as that depicted in most textbooks, then a true-to-scale solar system has Pluto, not on the foldout leaf, but as an unseeable microbe, several miles from the book. If you unraveled the DNA found packed into any one of the billions of molecules that comprise you, it would stretch out six feet. This is the stuff of which great cocktail party factoids are made! This is the best book I have read since the hugely popular John Adams by McCullough came out several years ago. The level of research alone is astounding. Bryson seems to have culled everything that ever was chronicled. Although I am as far from being a scientist as we are to reaching the edge of the universe (discussed by Bryson, of course), I heartily recommend this book. Improbably.
Rating:
Summary: I wish my science teacher had taught this way
Review: This book is a treasure. Bryson is witty, literate, and knowledgeable, with an uncanny ability to personalize and make accessible the most arcane of scientific principles. My favorite is the description of the history of the world (4.5 billion years more or less) compressed into a single day. Now I want to go find other books this smart fellow has written. Bravo!
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Summary: Mr. Bryson puts it all in perspective
Review: From atomic structures to heavenly bodies, Bill Bryson runs the gamut of scientific fact and theory, and does so with the layman in mind. To most of us, quantum theory, quarks, and dark matter are as dumbfounding as the end of Pi. But Mr. Bryson show us the whens, wheres and hows of these items without making us feel like complete idiots. The thing that stood out most in my mind while reading this, was the amount of time it took for the scientific community to accept relevant facts about the Earth and sky. Einstein, working as a patent clerk, third class, was refused advancement even after his theories showed up on the scientific radar. He was also shot down when he applied to become a college teacher (NO!) and then denied again as a high school teacher (NO! again). I also found it interesting that scientists continue to be petty, even into the 20th century. When a meteorologist discovered plate tectonics, his theories were ignored because he wasn't a geologist. Amazingly, many of the names that Mr. Bryson spills forth on these pages should be lauded within the text books of our children and college students, but aren't. Mainly because their ideas were stolen away by someone of a more 'appropriate stature.' I liked this book quite a bit, but it didn't grab me as much as Mr. Bryson's travelogues. He's a great writer, but I still love 'A Walk In the Woods' and 'In a Sunburned Country' much more. But bravo on this fine accomplishment, too, Mr. Bryson. Bravo!
Rating:
Summary: Short cut to knowledge
Review: Congenial and witty as ever, Bill Bryson takes us on a daytrip through our own brains to all those half-understood, half-remembered nuggets of wisdom various science teachers vainly tried to explain to us years ago. This time, thanks to 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' much of this once dreary stuff is suddenly brought into sharp relief as understanding dawns. From the intricacies of atoms to the permutations of planets, it's all there in this huge tome. Thanks, Bill - and you managed it all without the merest hint of my old science teacher's beaky-nosed unpleasantness.
Rating:
Summary: funny, no politics
Review: I liked this book! It is funny and it doesn't want to promote a certain view -- the jokes that it makes are meant to be funny and not to promote an idea! OK, it is not a serious book for scholars but if you want a general overall view of history and a reason for laughs, you should get this. Even if you hated history in school, you will like this. I promise!
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