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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Summary: Great introductory book on the universe and the world
Review: This is a must read for those who have felt intimidated by the increasingly frequent headlines relating to discoveries in geology, chemistry, biotechnology, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics. Bryson does a masterful job in providing a easily understood overview of how we got to where we are and a framework for understanding the significance of where we are going. "A Short History About Nearly Everything" is an easy and fun read for all. With it, you will no longer be an uninterested spectator to the fundamental events shaping what we know, where we are going, and, most importantly, who we are in the 21st Century.
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Summary: Good Yarn
Review: Bill Bryson is a born storyteller. He introduces us to a land of hundreds of lively characters. For example, Newton is a crazed recluse, who spends a lot of time practicing alchemy and is so distracted he can barely get out of bed. His friend Haley asks him about the orbital path of the earth and Newton has already figured it out, but he can't find his calculations among his mess. It is only with Haley's encouragement that he grudgingly rewrites it, and then goes on to write his Magnum Opus Principia Mathematica.
Meanwhile, Dinosaur fossil hunters throw rocks at each others at each others excavation teams and are caught literally stealing fossils from each other. There are plenty of villainous and noble characters, and hilarious exploits. I feel as though Bill Byrson visited my living room and brought with him many lively and some deranged dinner guests. But this book is informative as well as entertaining. Bryson inspires a curiosity and respect for our beautiful and unlikely world. Where, for example right now, the Reverend Evans may now be trudging a eucalyptus covered hill to search for supernovae, which is his talent. He will continue to do this despite the fact that it can now be done automatically, and we will continue to look with him.
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