At home

Where Bryson's "Short History of Nearly Everything" leads you through all the big questions about the origins of our worlds (and the people who made the discoveries), this book tries to examine the history of every day life. It's stuffed full of fantastic anecdotes, interesting fun facts and a perspective of history that's new to most of us. More than anything, it highlights how many people has played a big part in shaping our world, and that small inventions and ideas can have big consqeunces in the life of many.

What Bill Bryson did really well in "Short History..." was to tie together stories that on the surface are not that related, and give the a flow that was very easy to follow as a reader. Bryson is a great story teller. In this book the gimmick is that he uses his own house as the basis and structure of the book. This does not really work, and I feel that it to some degree ruined the flow of the book. There's also several sections where I found myself losing interest in the stories told. This is not suprising in such a big book with so many different stories, but it never happened in "Short History...". Perhaps it's easier to grab my attention with the people who discovered how the world worked, than the people who discovered how asymmetrical architecture should work?

And as always with these kind of books: I wish I remembered even a percent of what I read. It's super interesting, but nothing sticks. Oh well.

(From my blog Near Earth Object)

About halfway through Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, one can’t help but come to a couple of stark conclusions. One, that most of humanity’s domestic life, for the vast majority of time time we had domestic lives, was full of suffering and misery the likes of which we moderns can barely imagine. Two, that the tiny percentage of the species blessed with an overabundance of money and/or status have not been content to simply live well, but have wasted vast economic resources to spoil and aggrandize themselves in ways that would make Ozymandias cringe.

Bryson is a wonderful writer, and his storytelling is as usual conversational while remaining high-minded, as he clearly glories in his research and discoveries while allowing the space for the reader to catch up to him.

But his subject, I suppose, necessitated the retelling of these two central themes I’ve mentioned: The misery of the underclasses (disease, vermin, cold, being overwhelmed by feces, etc.) and the unabated vanity of the rich (who also, it should be noticed, were subject to disease and other unpleasantness, but often in Bryson’s telling faced ruin by their own ignorance or hubris). But if it is necessary, it is also relentless. Story after story, anecdote after anecdote is a tail that either makes one feel deep pity for those who are crushed under the weight of their poverty or nausea over the largess of the aristocracy. In between are the triumphs, the brilliant ideas, the advances, but it becomes almost exhausting when one contemplates the mayhem from which the victories emerge.

Here’s a good summation from the book, a quote from Edmond Halley (of comet fame), that I feel gets to the heart of the long crawl of human domesticity — human daily life — over the centuries.

How unjustly we repine at the shortness of our Lives and think our selves wronged if we attain not Old Age; where it appears hereby, that the one half of those that are born are dead in Seventeen years.… [So] instead of murmuring at what we call an untimely Death, we ought with Patience and unconcern to submit to that Dissolution which is the necessary Condition of our perishable Materials.

Despite the amount of information, more than someone can actually process, this is a fascinating and enjoyable book. Bill Bryson did a prodigious amount of research on the history of nearly everything from architecture to epidemics and toilets to crinolines and wigs.

We discover that there is a lot of history, excitement, even danger in the rooms and the corners of our houses and the domestic life is certainly more spicy, interesting and complicated than we thought. Bill Bryson’s irresistible wit and humour makes it an entertaining reading.

By the way did you know that Thomas Jefferson, as well as being the author of the Declaration of Independence, was also the father of the American French fry.

And, that… rats have a lot of sex - up to twenty times a day and if a male rat can’t find a female, he will willingly - even happily - find relief in a male.