by Bill Bryson, Doubleday. ISBN 0385408188, £20. (Broadway, ISBN 0767908171, $27.50 in the US.)
Bill Bryson simply could not write another paragraph about being presented with a disappointing dish of food, he explained on a book tour in May. Fortunately, he had other ideas. The writer best known for his humorous travel accounts was struck by how little he really knew about the planet he called home. The result is the modestly titled A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Any scientist – or for that matter science journalist – inclined to resent Bryson’s hubris will find much to feel smug about in this book. There are a number of errors, some of them cringeworthy, and Bryson draws from popular sources such as The Economist at least as frequently as he does from scientific papers or his own reporting.
But to dwell on such technicalities would be to overlook the fact that Bryson has written an entertaining and informative 500-page book about science, which in itself is an accomplishment. Quirky characters from the history of science make up a large part of Bryson’s material, but a larger theme is his sense of wonder at details of this universe we are lucky enough to inhabit. He spurns scientific notation, instead illustrating very large and very small amounts with passages such as: “If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you 20 years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period. It was, in other words, an extremely long time ago and the world was a very different place.”
From analogies like this, as well as from Bryson’s apocalyptic depictions of the havoc that supervolcanoes, meteor impacts, or climate change would wreak on civilization as we know it, the reader is left with a sense of mankind’s rare and precarious place in the universe. We are here only because our ancestors (human and otherwise) were in the right place at the right time; we are anomalous inhabitants of a bacteria-dominated planet; we have existed as a species for a pitifully brief period of time. This thread runs through the book, weaving a coherent whole from what otherwise might have been nothing more than a motley assemblage of big numbers, interesting facts and comically eccentric scientists.
The book is at its best when Bryson goes into the field (or the lab or museum). Through him we meet the Reverend Robert Evans, an Australian “titan of the skies” who hunts supernovae from his back sun deck; Paul Doss, a Harley-Davidson-riding Yellowstone National Park geologist; and Len Ellis, who has studied mosses behind the scenes at London’s Natural History Museum for the past 27 years. With these conversations, Bryson paints a picture of what day-to-day science is like.
