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!
Rating: 
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!
Rating: 
Summary: Book Report on Popular Science
Review: For me, this book was very disappointing. Rather than being a well-thought out book on science, it turned out to be a book report on the best-selling science books of the last twenty years. If one looks at the bibliography and the notes at the end, it becomes obvious that Bill Bryson gets most of his information from sources aimed at the general reader. I think one would be much better off reading the books in the bibliography that go into each subject in-depth and are written by specialists rather than getting this summary version. Bryson also seems to have a fixation with all the ways nature can destroy our civilization.
Rating:
Summary: An Amazing Read
Review: In an age of increasing credulity it is refreshing to find an accesible book regarding science and scientific method. Bill Bryson takes the baton from the late Carl Sagan and Steven J. Gould and does an excellent job making sometimes difficult subject matter not only readable but entertaining. A Short History of Nearly Everything should be required reading for everyone in America!
Rating:
Summary: good, period(.)
Review: If you love the sciences, this is a must read. If you hate the sciences, not reading this would be treason to humanity. As complete as a holistic science book gets, and with such a broad spectrum to cover, Bryson writes with enough clarity to impress an english major, and with enough interesting information fascinate and enlighten a geologist. The book was completly impressive except for maybe the last chapter which was seemed to be more agenda-driven than enlightening. But all in all, a must-read. Buy this book for your cousin who does cancer research, or for your bussinessman uncle. Everyone can get into it....everyone should get into it.
Rating:
Summary: The history of our times and life
Review: This excellent book takes an in-depth look at not only the history of modern science but how it got there, who did it and why it happened. It takes an incredible look at the complexity of life and is very humbling of our own meager 'successes' when compared to the magnificience of nature and its marvels. It touches nearly every subject of science and presents them as school should present it to its students: how and why are they relevent to us and why should we care? Science is too often squarely objective, cold and unattractive and a main reason seems to be that both kids and adults do not understand just how prevalent science is in our modern technology. It's not worth learning about science if you don't know how to use it, what it can do and what it can't do. This book presents science in a way we can relate and understand in everyday life and still manages to go deep enough in explanations to explain the workings of the complexity that surrounds us from the perspective of someone who uses science, as is the majority of us, as opposed to someone who makes science.
Rating:
Summary: Bryson makes science interesting
Review: I bought a bunch of books online, most on a whim, and two stood out from the rest. Make Every Girl Want You and A Short History of Nearly Everything. I learned more from these two books than everything else combined (yes, between the two books, the authors covered everything from the science of women to the history of science). Bryson covers everything, and I do mean everything. I've never been a science buff, but I learned so much from this book that I just refused to read in school. Bryson's biggest asset is his ability to make science interesting. Which is peculiar, because Bryson has a tendency to ramble in his other books, but he keeps things concise (well, as concise as you can in a 600 page book) and interesting in this one. I agree with the other reviewer who said - if only actual textbook writers could write like this!
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