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Loading... A Short History of Nearly Everything (Abridged Audioboook)by Bill Bryson
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I really loved this book. Covering the history behind astronomy, meteorology, biology, anthropology, physics, chemisty, paleontology, geology and probably more - it covers the major breakthroughs and the minds that thought of them. I was disappointed to dicover that this version is abridged; I will certainly read the full version. ( )no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0739302949, Audio CD)From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. Though A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as "The Size of the Earth" and "Life Itself." Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Life and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it's when Bryson dives into some of science's best and most embarrassing fights--Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould--that he finds literary gold. --Therese Littleton(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:22 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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