a short history of nearly everything pages

In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through time and space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings.

It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. This book is his quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us.

This also will help extend KLIATT's usefulness in public libraries.Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. This code will help librarians and teachers working in high schools where there are honors and advanced placement students. S-Recommended for senior high school students.Ī-Recommended for advanced students and adults. With a wink or a sly leer that comes across in his narration, Matthews is magnificent. What a stroke of genius to have Matthews read with his dry British accent, often Monty Pythonian in delivery he is absolutely perfect here.

It includes smiles and laughs in place of footnotes.īryson has done an encyclopedia-load of scientific research, but he presents it with an anecdotal, light touch. More than an ordinary textbook, this covers everything from Anthropology to Zoology, from outer to inner space, from microbes to blue whales, from atoms to the boundless infinity of space with numerous stops in between.

APA style: A Short History of Nearly Everything.

A Short History of Nearly Everything.' Retrieved from

MLA style: 'A Short History of Nearly Everything.' The Free Library.

A short history of nearly everything pages