 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
A Short History of Nearly Everything
By Bill Bryson
Random House $54.95
 Not to be confused with Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey's similarly hefty volume, 'A Short History of the World', Bill Bryson's latest work is noteworthy for being totally unlike anything he has written before.
As millions of his readers know, Bryson is the 'reluctant traveller' who made a considerable reputation for travelling through a range of places, including England, Africa (most recently for the CARE agency) and Australia, then writing about them in ways most people find utterly hilarious.
This unexpected tome charts his travels through time and space, a journey inspired by gazing at a school science book and becoming fixated on a cutaway of the Earth's interior, with its core of iron and nickel as hot as the surface of the Sun.
'I still tend to trust the pronouncements of scientists in the way I trust those of surgeons, plumbers and other possessors of arcane and privileged information - but I couldn't for the life of me conceive how any human mind could work out what spaces thousands of miles below us, that no eye had ever seen and no X-ray could penetrate, could look like and be made of.'
Bryson resolved to both understand science and profile the luminaries who have unlocked its secrets and revealed them to a world as unknowing as him, you and me. His three-year pilgrimage into the annals of scientific history includes a 14-page bibliography, while his giant manuscript was run past a range of critics to ensure he got things right.
The result is immensely informative and highly entertaining, a wonderful, if costly, addition to the bookshelf and an ideal gift for both adults and questing teenagers.
Who would have guessed that Edmond Halley, a sea captain who wrote on magnetism and the effects of opium, and invented the deep-sea diving bell, did not discover the comet that bears his name?
Or that the great Isaac Newton sometimes swung his legs out of bed in the morning and became so distracted by his thoughts that he would sit immobilised for hours?
Bryson revels in the social context of science, breathing life into all manner of facts - 'Your heart must pump 3 million litres in a year - that's enough to fill four Olympic sized swimming pools.'
His grand opus can be savoured at random or read in sequence from the start of the cosmos to the present day. Now that's a travel story!
- Thanks to Book Warehouse in Keen Street, Lismore for supporting this column.
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