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Bryson, Bill.
A Short History of Nearly Everything
(Audiobook, Unabridged).
Westminster, MD: Books on Tape, 2003.
ISBN 0-7366-9320-3.
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What an astonishing achievement! Toward the end of the 1990s, Bill
Bryson, a successful humorist and travel writer, found himself on a
flight across the Pacific and, looking down on the ocean, suddenly
realised that he didn't know how it came to be, how it affected the
clouds above it, what lived in its depths, or hardly anything else
about the world and universe he inhabited, despite having lived in an
epoch in which science made unprecedented progress in understanding
these and many other things. Shortly thereafter, he embarked upon a
three year quest of reading popular science books and histories of
science, meeting with their authors and with scientists in numerous
fields all around the globe, and trying to sort it all out
into a coherent whole.
The result is this stunning book, which neatly packages
the essentials of human knowledge about the workings of the
universe, along with how we came to know all of these things
and the stories of the often fascinating characters who figured
it all out, into one lucid, engaging, and frequently funny
package. Unlike many popular works, Bryson takes pains to
identify what we don't know, of which there is a
great deal, not just in glamourous fields like particle physics
but in stuffy endeavours such as plant taxonomy. People who
find themselves in Bryson's position at the outset—entirely
ignorant of science—can, by reading this single work, end up
knowing more about more things than even most working scientists
who specialise in one narrow field. The scope is encyclopedic:
from quantum mechanics and particles to galaxies and cosmology,
with chemistry, the origin of life, molecular biology, evolution,
genetics, cell biology, paleontology and paleoanthropology,
geology, meteorology, and much, much more, all delightfully told,
with only rare errors, and with each put into historical context. I
like to think of myself as reasonably well informed about science, but
as I listened to this audiobook over a period of several weeks on my daily
walks, I found that every day, in the 45 to 60 minutes I listened,
there was at least one and often several fascinating things of which I
was completely unaware.
This audiobook is distributed in three parts, totalling 17 hours and
48 minutes. The book is read by British narrator Richard Matthews,
who imparts an animated and light tone appropriate to the text. He
does, however mispronounce the names of several scientists, for
example physicists Robert Dicke (whose last name he pronounces “Dick”,
as opposed to the correct “Dickey”) and Richard Feynman (“Fane-man”
instead of “Fine-man”), and when he attempts to pronounce French names
or phrases, his accent is fully as affreux
as my own, but these are minor quibbles which hardly detract from an
overall magnificent job. If you'd prefer to read the book, it's
available in paperback now, and there's
an illustrated edition, which
I haven't seen. I would probably
never have considered this book, figuring I already knew it all, had
I not read Hugh Hewitt's
encomium to it and excerpts therefrom he included (parts
1,
2,
3).
November 2007