A very good, very interesting, but rather dense read. It isn't as hysterically funny as Bryson often is, but still very entertaining, and extremely informative. It is essentially a history of how people live, based on how our homes have developed - from the great Hall of the Middle Ages, with ...
Two stars for the first half of the book, four stars for the 2nd, so that leaves me at 3 stars for the whole thing.Several of the early essays of this collection focus on the early history of the Royal Society and the philosophy of science. They're very academic, hard to read, and full of RS-rel...
This is one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read. There, I said itBryson's book combines the best qualities of science writers like Attenborough, Diamond, Durrell, and Wilson; presenting the information with the wit he is most known for. It is an amazing achievement to condense the entire...
The Lost Continental: A Look at Bill BrysonI must preface this essay by saying that if everyone didn’t like this Bill Bryson book as much as I didn’t (at least the person he is in this book), he would be about the wealthiest author on the planet. At least I bought it. I have several of his books ...
Bill Bryson is near the top of my Most Read Authors list, not because I'm a particular fan, but because his audiobooks make easy listening for my daily walks. He doesn't attempt to do voices, I don't need to think too hard, and sometimes his stabs at humour make me laugh (and more often, make me ...
Since I moved to England this fall, I haven’t done too much travelling around the country. I’ve been to London a couple of times, neither of which I did much that could be described as a touristy; the same applies to my trips to Cambridge. I went up to Scotland during the half-term and had a good...
I have to share my discontent with the world after keeping the words bottled up inside me for so long.I bought this book about two or three years ago, thinking it might be an entertaining read that might fill me in on some of the historical aspects of the English language. I had already read "A S...
Book ReviewThe Life and Times of the Thunderbolt KidBy Bill BrysonReviewed by Tom CarricoI am not usually one to enjoy a memoir. There always seems to be a certain smugness that someone must possess to have the audacity to think that their story is better than, well, mine. This memoir, however,...
Much, MUCH, MUCH more than a history of the English language in America! Bryson with magical and funny writing links the evolution of language with the evolution of culture, science, recreation, food, politics. His controversial or almost heretical debunkings of accepted history are supported w...
This audiobook was a perfect companion for a long road trip. Bill Bryson, who has now written books on everything from the history of the universe to the origins of our domesticity to America in the 1920s and, perhaps most endearingly, stories of his various travels around the world, here turns h...
Alternative cover editions for this ISBN can be found here, here, here and here As his many British fans already know, bearded Yankee butterball Bill Bryson specialises in going to countries we think we know well, only to return with travelogues that are surprisingly cynical and yet shockingly a...
It would be charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed. Consider this hearty announcement in a Yugoslavian hotel: "The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chamber-maid. Turn to her straightaway." Or this warning to motorists in Tokyo: "When a passenger of the f00t ...
covenant and combine our?elves togeather into a civil body politick for our better ordering and preſervation and furtherance of ye end aforeſaid ... So begins the Mayflower Compact, written in 1620 shortly before the Mayflower Pilgrims stepped ashore. The passage, I need hardly point out, contain...
That wasn’t their intention or expectation, of course, but that was the effect of it.The men in question were Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Sir Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England; Hjalmar Schacht, head of the Reichsbank in Germany; and Charles Ris...
We have walked the ancient tracks of England, from Offa’s Dyke to the Ridgeway, traipsed through the steep hills and green meadows of the Peak District and Yorkshire Dales, followed the Thames from source to sea, clambered to the tops of Dorset’s highest hills, and met many other challenges and a...
It was stately. It was imposing. It took whole minutes to cross. But it was also somehow flat and dull. This may have had something to do with the weather, which was likewise flat and dull. Missouri looked precisely the same as Illinois, which had looked precisely the same as Iowa. The only diffe...
The historian Joyce Youings calls the belief in an Elizabethan ecstasy “part of the folklore of the English-speaking peoples,” and adds that “few people alive in the 1590s in an England racked by poverty, unemployment and commercial depression would have said that theirs was a better world or tha...
We walked eighteen miles to Front Royal, where my wife was to pick us up in two days if she managed to find her way by car from New Hampshire in an unfamiliar country. I had to go off for a month to do other things—principally, try to persuade people to buy a book of mine even though it had nothi...
We set off bright and early to drive to Kisumu, Kenya’s third city, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Kisumu is only about 300 kilometers west of Nairobi, but the roads are potholed and slow for much of the way, so we had to allow five hours to get there. I didn’t care. None of us did. We were four...
I am not good at shopping or parting with large sums of money at the best of times, and the prospect of trailing around a succession of shops listening to sales assistants touting the wonders of various office products filled me with foreboding. So imagine my delight when in the first computer st...
Dorothy Van Dorn, suing for divorce, complained that her husband 1) put all their food in a freezer, 2) kept the freezer locked, 3) made her pay for any food she ate, and 4) charged her the 3% Michigan sales tax. —Time magazine, December 10, 1951 FUN WAS A DIFFERENT KIND OF THING IN THE...
Waikiki. Beach and district in Honolulu, Hawaii. wainscot, wainscoting. Type of paneling. Waitemata Harbor, Auckland, New Zealand. waiver, waver. The first is a relinquishment of a claim; the second means to hesitate. Wajda, Andrzej. (1926–) Polish film director; pronounced vie'-da. Walden Pond. ...
To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader. Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. A Acharius, Erik, 196 action principles, 101 Adams, George, 140, 153 aerodynamics, 358 Aeschnogomphus, 185 $$ther, 65 Agricola, Georgius, De Re Metallica, 303 a...