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grizzly.anderson: Bryson likes to wander from one topic to another, and toss in bits of trivia and history. Schott's Miscellany is a fascinating collection of trivia without the attempt to thread it together.
fannyprice: Bryson's discussion of the development of the home from a more open, collaborative space to a warren of special-purpose rooms as the concept of "privacy" became more important dovetails nicely with Lethbridge's discussion of the increasing physical separation between servants and the served in 18th and 19th century British homes.… (more)
grizzly.anderson: What Bryson does for the home, taking it one room at a time and looking at how we got where we are, Mars & Kohlstedt do for cities and infrastructure.
cbl_tn: Both books address some of the same technological advances, such as refrigeration and electricity and artificial light, for a popular audience.
Classic Bill Bryson at his most tangentially fascinating. I've been reading this gradually for about nine months and it's always a joy to pick up. Biggest downside is somewhat unexamined decision to focus on history of the western Europe and the US, but a book has to set boundaries somewhere.... ( )
Four stars because I really enjoy Bryson's style and sense of humor.
Much of this book is fascinating but at the same time reading it is a bit like doing boring reading for homework. It's a great source of obscure and interesting facts and history - the kind of things that sink deep into your brain and you don't even remember knowing them until you find yourself watching Jeopardy and you realize you know who built the Erie canal.
It didn't enthrall me enough to keep me running back to it but I still enjoyed it. I think it would be a really good book to read at the same time you are reading a novel. ( )
A bit of a romp through Bill's stream of conscience with the development of the western home as the token theme but oh, what a stream! As always with his writing, a ton of fun, plus some arcane trivia to boot this time. ( )
I'm not one for reading non-fiction, but this book really sucked me in. I really enjoyed all the strange facts and stories. This was my first Bill Bryson book, but it definitely won't be my last! ( )
“At Home” is baggy, loose-jointed and genial. It moves along at a vigorously restless pace, with the energy of a Labrador retriever off the leash, racing up to each person it encounters, pawing and sniffing and barking at every fragrant thing, plunging into icy waters only to dash off again, invigorated. You do, somehow, maintain forward momentum and eventually get to the end. Bryson is fascinated by everything, and his curiosity is infectious.
Bryson is certainly famous enough to have got away with a far less bulging compendium. Instead, on our behalf, he’s been through those hundreds of books (508 according to the bibliography) some of which even the most assiduous readers among us might never have got around to: Jacques Gelis’s History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern Europe, say, or John A Templer’s The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls and Safer Designs. He’s then extracted their most arresting material and turned the result into a book that, for all its winning randomness, is not just hugely readable but a genuine page-turner — mainly because you can’t wait to see what you’ll find out next.
Some time after we moved into a former Church of England rectory in a village of tranquil anonymity in Norfolk, I had occasion to go up into the attic to look for the source of a slow but mysterious drip.
Chapter I The Year
In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of ground and containing within its airy vastness enough room for four St. Paul's Cathedrals.
Quotations
Jane Loudon published "Gardening for Ladies" in 1841. It was the first book to encourage women of elevated classes to get their hands dirty and even to take on a faint glow of perspiration. It bravely insisted that women could manage gardening independent of male supervision if they simply observed a few sensible precautions - working steadily but not too vigorously, using only light tools, never standing on damp ground because of the unhealthy emanations that would rise up though their skirts.
We are so used to having a lot of comfort in our lives—to being clean, warm, and well fed—that we forget how recent most of that is.
If I had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly.
Not until 1954 was the work complete. Nearly two hundred years after Jefferson started on it, Monticello was finally the house he had intended it to be.
We now come to the most dangerous part of the house—in fact, one of the most hazardous environments anywhere: the stairs.
Private life was completely transformed in the nineteenth century—socially, intellectually, technologically, hygienically, sartorially, sexually, and in almost any other respect that could be made into an adverb.