A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING

I read Notes From a Small Island years ago and was underwhelmed, but since people kept telling me how much they love Bill Bryson, he fit my audiobook criteria: Am curious enough to check it out, but don’t want to actually want to spend precious reading time on it. My library only offered a few Bryson books on CD, so I chose this one semi-blindly. And I’m so glad I did, because I loved it. As usual with science, my comprehension of the nitty-gritty mechanics faded in and out, but I understood enough to be both riveted and awed. Bryson not only provides a useful survey of every major scientific discipline (physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, meteorology, geology, and more) but also gossipy, hilarious glimpses of the personalities behind them. I used to edit biographies of scientists at my last job, so I’d already developed a taste for the history of science, particularly trivia about the oddities of its geniuses (Babbage and his hatred of street musicians! Newton and his wacky eye-poking experiment!), and Bryson provided a whole feast. Listening to this book on my commute, I came home every day bursting with new “Did you know…?” tales with which to regale A and anyone else who would listen. (Did you know that nearly all of Marie Curie’s belongings, from her research notes to her cookbooks, are still so radioactive that they have to be stored in lead boxes and handled wearing protective gear? Did you know that the unfortunate man who invented leaded gasoline also invented CFCs, and was killed by yet another of his inventions?) Sure, it may have given me some serious new apocalyptic scenarios to worry about (I’m already scared of earthquakes and global warming, but I had never thought about the likelihood of a meteor slamming into the Earth or the eruption of the gigantic volcano under Yellowstone National Park, both of which extinction-level events Bryson details with a little too much gusto), but overall this was an incredibly enlightening and entertaining book that I recommend to absolutely everyone.

A note on the audiobook factor: Even though it brightened up my commutes immeasurably, I almost would rather have read this book than listened to it. There were a lot of complex ideas to absorb, and it’s hard to really focus on statistics when you’re navigating traffic tangles. Also, Bryson’s train of thought seemed to keep wandering, which initially frustrated me until I peeked at a copy of the book at the library and realized that a lot of what sounded like digressions were actually footnotes, which the narrator simply read in line with the text—proving that sometimes, having the actual page in front of you can be extremely helpful. On the plus side, mad props to the narrator for navigating all the insanely difficult pronunciations (including phrases in a host of languages, the names of hundreds of different scientists, and highly technical scientific terminology) with ease in a pleasant British accent. I do think I’d like to buy a copy of the book so I can read it “for real” sometime.