Product Description
One of the world?s most beloved and bestselling writers takes his ultimate journey -- into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.

In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail -- well, most of it. In In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world?s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.


From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Review
From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. Though A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as "The Size of the Earth" and "Life Itself." Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Life and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it's when Bryson dives into some of science's best and most embarrassing fights--Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould--that he finds literary gold. --Therese Littleton

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
Pt. I	Lost in the Cosmos	7
1	How to Build a Universe	9
2	Welcome to the Solar System	19
3	The Reverend Evans's Universe	29
Pt. II	The Size of the Earth	41
4	The Measure of Things	43
5	The Stone-Breakers	63
6	Science Red in Tooth and Claw	79
7	Elemental Matters	97
Pt. III	A New Age Dawns	113
8	Einstein's Universe	115
9	The Mighty Atom	133
10	Getting the Lead Out	149
11	Muster Mark's Quarks	161
12	The Earth Moves	173
Pt. IV	Dangerous Planet	187
13	Bang!	189
14	The Fire Below	207
15	Dangerous Beauty	224
Pt. V	Life Itself	237
16	Lonely Planet	239
17	Into the Troposphere	255
18	The Bounding Main	270
19	The Rise of Life	287
20	Small World	302
21	Life Goes On	321
22	Good-bye to All That	335
23	The Richness of Being	350
24	Cells	371
25	Darwin's Singular Notion	381
26	The Stuff of Life	397
Pt. VI	The Road to Us	417
27	Ice Time	419
28	The Mysterious Biped	434
29	The Restless Ape	453
30	Good-bye	469
	Notes	479
	Bibliography	517
	Index	529