Bill Bryson is by no means an expert on most of the topics discussed in his book, but he has clearly researched and polled the world’s leading authorities and summed it all up for us in this very readable and often humorous story of natural history, one of my favorite subjects. From the formation of the universe and our solar system, to plate tectonics and the elements, to cells and the rise of life and beyond, it reads much like a novel and is easily digestible in small portions. The book’s introduction also contains what has become one of my favorite memorable quotes:

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.”

You can hardly help but feel pretty darn special in this universe.

This book had several key themes, one of the most prevalent is we don’t know shit. There are so many things I thought we as humans knew about our world, that just are unknown. So all these sci-fi shows aren’t as unbelievable as I previously thought.

Another thing is that we are new. Humans are babies compared to other species on Earth. Also we killed a lot of species.

Oh, and the Earth is still in a mild ice age. Turns out we live on the edge. Major Volcanoes are due for eruptions (Yellowstone) and asteroids are due to collide, and our climate is due to enter a big ass ice age.

But again, we still don’t know shit. We don’t really know all that much about evolution. We have bits and pieces of fossils, and it’s a big ass connect the dots. Weird.

Bill Bryson is one of the best writers I have ever read. His dry wit has an ability to make me laugh that is equalled only by the late, great Douglas Adams.

If only all science books were as entertaining as Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bryson explains the major scientific theories known to man with masterful storytelling skills. Weaving in richly researched details on the lives and characteristics of the foremost historical scientific figures, Bryson discourses on everything from the big bang theory and quantum physics, to paleontology and plate tectonics. As he put it, the book is about “…how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since.” Not just detailing what we know, Bryson describes how we learned what we now know.

As an undergraduate Earth Sciences major 20 some odd years ago I remember one of my geology professors describing how the theory of plate tectonics had at that time recently turned the entire Geology field upside down, and how as a theory it had been utterly reviled for years, until the evidence was so overwhelming it had to be accepted and embraced. According to Bryson, this violent resistance to breakthrough ideas appears to be a pattern often repeated.

I have a few things to say about the audiobook. I listened to the abridged version from Audible.com which was narrated by Bryson himself. He has a lovely voice. So lovely and calming in fact that I nearly fell asleep several times while driving and listening to the book. The content of the book is extremely interesting, so much so that I kept on pulling my hair to feel some pain so that I could stay awake to listen to it. I’m serious. This is a great book. There must be something in his voice; I bet if it were analyzed it would be found to trigger the alpha and beta brain waves conducive to sleep. My mother was listening to it as well and I had to wake her up several times. We finally had to take breaks from listening. They cut a lot out to make the abridged version 5 hours down from I think 17? I’m planning to buy the book to see what I’ve missed.

This is not a bad book. It gives a general overview of many episodes in the history of science. I just found the science too light and the history too shallow for my taste. I wouldn’t recommend anyone away from this, but couldn’t in good conscience mark it as “worth consuming” when I didn’t bother finishing it.