Whenever I'm asked about my favorite authors, Bill Bryson always makes the list. Not only has he written a string of humorous yet informative travel narratives, he's also penned a memoir about his 1950s childhood and a variety of non-fiction books on topics as diverse as the English language, Shakespeare and a rather grand attempt at a book called A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bryson is able to make whatever he is writing about amazingly interesting while also being gently humorous. I've always thought that if Bill Bryson wrote the history and English textbooks for schools, everyone would do their required reading and come away bursting with information and insights. Whenever someone tells me that they don't like nonfiction, I always ask if they've read Bill Bryson. To me, he is the epitome of the accessible nonfiction writer, and I would follow him anywhere.

In At Home: A Short History of Private Life, I followed Bryson as he toured his family home, which just so happens to be an old English parsonage. As he goes through each room, he ruminates about why we live the way we do and how the rooms and things in our homes evolved. The journey through the house is riveting and educational--answering such questions as: Why are salt and pepper the two condiments we keep on our kitchen tables? What does "board" mean in the phrase "room and board?" Why are there four tines on a fork? Why do men have a row of pointless buttons on their suit jacket sleeves?

Each chapter focuses on a different room, allowing Bryson to explore things such as the history of hygiene in the bathroom, the advent of electricity while poking around the fuse box, and the important issues of sex, death and sleeping while visiting the bedroom. It is an ingenious way to structure the book, and it gives Bryson lots of leeway to ramble about wherever his interests and research took him. For the most part, Bryson focuses on the last 150 years, which encompasses the time from when his home was built until modern times--and also, as Bryson points out, when "the modern world was really born.

The book is packed with interesting stories, facts, anecdotes and histories that if I took the time to tell you about all the ones that interested me, I would be writing a book myself. So, I'll content myself with sharing a few excerpts from the book that I highlighted while reading. (And even then I had to cut out a few because I highlighted so many.)

On the popularity of hermitages: For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for £100 a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub.

Statistics on stairs: Everybody trips on stairs at some time or other. It has been calculated that you are likely to miss a step once in every 2,222 occasions you use stairs, suffer a minor accident once in every 63,000 uses, suffer a painful accident once in every 734,000, and need hospital attention once every 3,616,667 uses.

On Christopher Columbus: It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. He filled his holds with valueless iron pyrite (thinking it was gold) and with what he confidently believed to be cinnamon and pepper. The first was actually a worthless tree bark, and the second were not true peppers but chili peppers--excellent when you have grasped the general idea of them, but a little eye-wateringly astonishing

A more interesting side effect of lead paint: One of the quirks of lead poisoning is that it causes an enlargement of the retina that makes some victims see halos around objects--an effect Vincent van Gogh famously exploited in his paintings. It is probable that he was suffering lead poisoning himself. Artists often did.

On servant-master sleep arrangements: Even at home, it was entirely usual for a servant to sleep at the foot of his master's bed, regardless of what his master might be doing within the bed. The records make clear that King Henry V's steward and chamberlain both were present when he bedded Catherine of Valois.

On the difficulties of getting medical care while being a woman: As late as 1878 the British Medical Journal was able to run a spirited and protracted correspondence on whether a menstruating woman's touch could spoil a ham.

On the dangers of life before proper sewer systems: Most sewage went into cesspits, but these were commonly neglected, and the contents often seeped into neighboring water supplies. In the worst cases they overflowed. Samuel Pepys recorded one such occasion in his diary: "Going down into my cellar ... I put my foot into a great heap of turds ... by which I found that Mr Turner's house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me."

I just adored this book and was engrossed through all 512 pages. This is vintage Bryson, and his fans will not be disappointed. And, if you've never read a Bill Bryson book before, I strongly encourage you to do so. No one presents history with as much humor, accessibility and curiosity as Bryson. (And if there is someone who does, I need to know who it is!) And since we all live in homes of some kind, I'm sure everyone will find something of interest in this book. After all, we are all benefiting from the advances and history described in this book. For my part, I know that I'll never turn on a light, flush a toilet, sit in a chair, or walk up a flight of stairs without thinking of some anecdote from this book. Highly recommended.

As history lesson's go, Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life has a lot going for it. When, after all, is that last time you looked at a fuse box and wondered where it came from? Bryson's thesis, which is that everything you take for granted in your home is the result of a major historical change is right on. I loved reading about the history of lighting, for example, and the reasons why people continued burning candles even after lamps were in common use. Bryson's indepth discussion of pepper debunks a lot of old myths (that pepper was popular mainly because it masked the taste of rotten food) and his interesting explanations of diseases caused by vitamin dificiencies will open a lot of eyes.

But one thing you should know about this book is that it is very, very England-centric. Bryson does explain this when the discusses the wide use of servants (even at the height of servant use they were never as common in the United States) and the effect that America had on the export of ice, but he much of the rest of the time he seems to forget that he's got a pretty big American audience reading the book. While he goes on and on about Mrs. Beaton's housekeeping books for example, he leaves out the influence of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School on cooking in the United States. Particularly tedious to Americans might be the extensive discussion of Great Houses, the assumption that it was almost impossible to do certain things yourself (such as laundry) when in fact Americans were doing these things.

Bryson seems to like areas where Americans were something like the British. He spends a fair amount of time on the Great Houses of the new rich in America at the end of the 19th century, and spends a bit of time on all the intermarrying that went on between Americans and British aristocrats. He seems to think that 500 wealthy Americans marrying British aristocrats in one year was a huge number--which it was for the British. For the Americans it was a drop in the bucket. Most important the lives of these extremely wealthy people are not nearly as interesting as the day to day home lives of average Americans. Unfortunately Bryson doesn't seem to agree.

Bryson's writing on American Great Houses contains one weird error. When discussing the Vanderbilt mansions Bryson describes the way buildings were torn down and says that "By 1947 all had gone. Not one of the family's country houses was lived in for a second generation."

Well maybe not lived in but certainly not destroyed. The Breakers, the most famous of the Vanderbilt country houses can be seen in Newport,RI and hosts thousands of tourists each year.

A great part of American home tradition does come from England. (As the product of two English grandparents) I know that more than most. I just wish that Bryson had specified in the title that he was talking, for the most part, about England. I have a feeling that many European readers may agree with me, not to mention those from Asia and Latin America.

Actually the book made me wish that Bryson would write another book, this one about America and the development of the American home. In the meantime I encourage one and all to dip into a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods for a window into how a Wisconsin family prepared for winter in the late 1870s.

Home. I love home. I love my home and I love the very idea, the concept, of home. God is good to give us home, to give us a place where we can just be, a place where we can center our lives. Think about your home, think about how good it is to have a place of your own, a place where you have your stuff and your people and where you live your life, and you'll realize what a calling it was for Christ to have no home, to have no place to call his own.

We look at home today, we look at private life, and tend to assume that things have always been as they are now. And yet this is not the case. The home and the private life have developed over time, slowly evolving into what they are today and slowly evolving toward what they will be tomorrow. Home and private life are the twin subjects of Bill Bryson's new book: At Home: A Short History of Private Life.

Bryson recently purchased an old Norfolk Church of England rectory as his home and it provides the starting point for his investigations. "Looking around my house, I was startled and somewhat appalled to realize how little I knew about the domestic world around me. Sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon, playing idly with the salt and pepper shakers, it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea why, out of all the spices in the world, we have such an abiding attachment to these two. Why not pepper and cardamom, or salt and cinnamon? And why do forks have four tines and not three or five?" Those mundane observations and the questions they generated got him started in his quest to understand home. And somehow he makes home, the most mundane place in our lives, utterly fascinating.

"If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly." Do you enjoy your home and all its comforts? That's because we humans have been working tirelessly for all these millennia to make home a place of comfort. Slowly, slowly we have gotten to the point we are at today.

To add structure to the book, Bryson walks through his home, room by room, and allows each room to be the subject of a chapter. Along the way Bryson offers all kinds of fantastic wanderings, meanderings and observations so that each room really is only a starting place. I am sure there are some who get frustrated by all of the author's wanderings. You'll have to learn to embrace them because they really are the point of the book. Embrace them, and you'll come to love them.

Consider this, something he observes while investigating the history of the bedroom.

Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye but unquestionably there. It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung--or frass, as it is known to entomologists.

Or how about stairs? Ever paused to think about stairs--how they came to be, and what kind of effect they have on us?

Everybody trips on stairs at some time or other. It has been calculated that you are likely to miss a step once in every 2,222 occasions you use stairs, suffer a minor accident once in every 63,000 uses, suffer a painful accident once in every 734,000, and need hospital attention once every 3,616,667 uses.

He often traces the history of words that we use all the time but think about seldom. Like toilet. Why on earth is toilet water something you daub on your face and something swirling around the bowl and carrying away your waste?

Perhaps no other word in English has undergone more transformations in its lifetime than toilet. Originally, in about 1540, it was a kind of cloth, a diminutive form of toile, a word still used to describe a type of linen. Then it became a cloth for use on dressing tables. Then it became the items on the dressing table (whence toiletries). Then it became the dressing table itself, then the act of dressing, then the act of receiving visitors while dressing, then the dressing room itself, then any kind of private room near a bedroom, then a room used lavatorially, and finally the lavatory itself. Which explains why toilet water in English can describe something you would gladly daub on your face or, simultaneously and more basically, water in a toilet.

He often relies on a subtle sense of humor that often got me laughing out loud. Like here, as he discusses wine:

But it is thanks to American roots that French wines still exist. It is impossible to say whether wines are worse now than they were before. Most authorities think not, but such a desperate remedy is bound to nurture lingering doubts among those who are inclined to have them. What is certainly true is that surviving pre-phylloxera wines have attracted a cachet that has led people to part with a good deal of their money and much of their common sense in a quest to possess something so deliciously irreplaceable. In 1985, Malcolm Forbes, the American publisher, paid $156,450 for a bottle of Chteau Lafite 1787. This made it much too valuable to drink, so he put it on display in a special glass case. Unfortunately, the spotlights that artfully lit the precious bottle caused the ancient cork to shrink and it fell with a $156,450 splash into the bottle. Even worse was the fate of an eighteenth-century Chteau Margaux reputed to have once been owned by Thomas Jefferson and valued, very precisely, at $519,750. While showing off his acquisition at a New York restaurant in 1989, William Sokolin, a wine merchant, accidentally knocked the bottle against the side of a serving cart and it broke, in an instant converting the world's most expensive bottle of wine into the world's most expensive carpet stain. The restaurant manager dipped a finger in the wine and declared that it was no longer drinkable anyway.

Or like here, when he discusses hygiene (and seriously, be grateful that we live in an age of good hygiene)!

As people adjusted to the idea that they might safely get wet from time to time, long-standing theories about personal hygiene were abruptly reversed. Now instead of it being bad to have pink skin and open pores, the belief took hold that the skin was in fact a marvelous ventilator--that carbon dioxide and other toxic inhalations were expelled through the skin, and that if pores were blocked by dust and other ancient accretions natural toxins would become trapped within and would dangerously accumulate. That's why dirty people--the Great Unwashed of Thackeray--were so often sick. Their clogged pores were killing them. In one graphic demonstration, a doctor showed how a horse, painted all over in tar, grew swiftly enfeebled and piteously expired. (In fact, the problem for the horse wasn't respiration but temperature regulation, though the point was, from the horse's perspective, obviously academic.)

I could go on and on. This book may not change your life, but I am sure you'll find yourself enjoying it a lot--and hopefully as much as I did. It isn't quite light reading, but it also isn't at all heavy. It's just the kind of book you'll love to read while sitting through a long flight or while crashing on the couch on a Saturday afternoon.

Really my only complaints with the book are these: Bryson uses the word agreeable a few too many times and he writes (not surprisingly) from the perspective of one who holds to evolution, something that comes through every now and again. Beyond that, it's just a good, fun, enjoyable, informative read. Buy it for yourself or get it for a gift. You'll love it.

To say that Bill Bryson has a way with words would be alike to saying that Roger Federer is good at tennis or Leonel Messi can kick a football. Bryson has the uncanny ability to take what otherwise might be extremely boring information and turn them into fascinating snippets of history, rolled in layman’s terms and sprinkled with humour. I have found myself laughing out loud on multiple occasions while reading At Home.

He also achieves something that many a teacher or lecturer would kill for, the ability to take complex and what could be very long-winded explanations and turn them into a cherished story that one would be happy to listen to time and time again in the pub or by a roaring fire in wintertime.

This is the kind of book you can devour in long sessions or pick up from time and time to read in episodes. The shear amount of research that Bryson must have undertaken to produce this little tome beggar’s belief and one can almost imagine him letting out shrieks of delight every time he found something else worthy of his study and inclusion. Hat’s off again for yet another example of Bryson making something very hard, seem so effortless.

Nobody can give us a short cultural history of nearly everything presented in such an entertaining manner as Bill Bryson can. In a few hundred pages he touches upon virtually every subject relevant for the development of our modern civilization, from food to fashion, building materials to Beau Brummell. Amazingly, he mixes his wide perspective with incredible atttention to detail. In a few short sentences he can give you an overview of Victorian literature, Darwin's contributions to science, or the history of archaeology, but at the same time he gives you the most fascinating details of the biographies he covers. I found his brief sketch of Pitt (Baron) Rivers absolutely fascinating. Bryson gives you more insight into his life and family in a few short chapters than most academics would have given you in a 2 volume biography. His thorough knowledge of history, science, and culture, combined with Bryson's elegant writing style and exceptional sense of humor, make "At Home: A Short History of Private Life," the most delightful and entertaining book you will have touched in a long time.

Should be called a 'short history of private life, and a lot about famous and not so famous people and death, death, death'. The book is filled with life stories of men and women who discovered or developed the foods, medicines, and items we use today. The book just wasn't what I expected. It was fairly interesting, but some of the biographies were so long and drawn out I had a hard time staying interested. One thing I am taking away from this book-- everyone alive today should get down on their knees and be thankful that they are not living in the world as he describes it. In the past people had surgery while being fully awake, children were forced to live regimented lives, lice and rats were living on and with everyone. I could go on and on, but the past was a pretty horrible place. It's just that reading about how terrible everything was in one book is a lot to take all at one time. He covers disease, poverty, accidents, lack of food, clean water, going your entire life without a bath, and on and on. Every page was filled with woe. People dying in every way you can imagine because they did not have the things we take for granted. I guess I am not pleased with this book was because I thought it was going to be a lighter read. As it is, it's a very depressing book almost from cover to cover. Prepare to be informed, but also prepare to be disgusted, sickened, and saddened.

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."

And in the meantime, invent the telephone and the flush toilet and make it a little easier.

A recommended read; a slog, but a delightful slog.

[See more at my blog, Near Earth Object, at near-earth(dot)com.]

The most popular Amazon review of the book point out "There's no point looking for a theme to At Home," but I think this misses the point. It's a combination history book, and social commentary, and as such there's little point looking for a theme. Or, let me rephrase that, the theme is how we incorporate history. As David Crabtree has argued "Our view of history shapes the way we view the present, and therefore it dictates what answers we offer for existing problems." Bryson offers different views of historical actors, the most salient, for me, being the reexamination of the Victorians; those glorified gallants who, it turns out, were money-grubbing bastards like the rest of us.

History also, I think, can be a way of commenting on the present in a way that protects the innocent. It's an allegory; a tale we can all accept, and over which we smugly guffaw, confident that our species has evolved beyond "that." Recently, as I watched a young man shuffling to cross the road before the light changed, his legs hobbled by a belt cinched around his knees to prevent further descent of his sagging pants, I was reminded of the absurdities of the 1700s fashion of wearing wigs 30 inches high. Indeed, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and it's doubtful that our paragon of fashion will ever read Bryson, or Santayana.

The author's ambitions for the book are foreshadowed in the introduction "... whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house." Some of the given examples are surprising in view of their current ubiquity - black pepper, tea, coffee, string, and glass windows to name a few. Others surprise us with the prevailing attitudes at their introduction, the phone for example, "The idea that you would chat by phone to someone you saw regularly anyway would have struck most people as absurd." And yet others, like gasoline, are still cause for large military budgets.

The book is replete with explnations which both appealed to the geek in me and answered some long-held but subconscious questions, like the origin of the (with)drawing room, why we use the term "room and board," and this: "In England the cabinet became the most exclusive and private of all chambers--the innermost sanctum where the most private meetings could take place. Then it made one of those bizarre leaps that words sometimes make and came to describe (by 1605) not just where the king met with his ministers, but the collective term for the ministers themselves. This explains why this one word (cabinet) now describes both the most intimate and exalted group of advisers in government and the shelved recess in the bathroom where we keep Ex-Lax and the like"

Having entertained and educated, Bryson reminds us of a broader social purpose in his closing statement: "The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither." Perhaps this is the theme, subtly presented so at to bring home the message.

. Loved it. Couldn't put it down.

Bill Bryson has an inquisitive mind; when he sets out to learn the history of the dining room, for example, he does so by way of tracing the history of the spice trade as it impacted Britain, which of course leads to a discussion of the East India Company, but which also leads to an explanation as to why salt and pepper are the common condiments found on every dining room table, as well as the arrival of tea and coffee to the UK, the reason why dinner moved from a midday meal to one sometimes quite late at night and much much more. His new book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, is a delightful wander through his own home, a former parsonage built in 1851, and while I'm not sure that I learned a lot about how specific rooms came to serve different purposes, I did learn a lot about, among other things, why the US became powerful when Canada did not (it has to do with the Erie Canal, which displaced the perfectly usable - and already existent - St. Lawrence Seaway as being the chief means of transporting goods to and from the interior of the continent), how cholera affected all classes though it was first considered a (deserved) disease of the poor, and why John Lubbock was so important to British history, yet so forgotten now. I read it straight through, but it would also work very well as a book to dip into from time to time, reading the odd chapter here and there, and giving one's brain the opportunity to absorb all the fascinating trivia included on every page. Highly recommended.

Leitura agradável e fluida, livro cheio de informações muito interessantes sobre a vida cotidiana ligada aos espaços da habitação, anedotas biográficas sobre personagens da história.

- The largest number of people ever to be indoors at a single location is 92,000, at the Great Exhibition in 1851 [p50].

- Clergymen sometimes preached against the potato since it does not appear in the Bible [p131].

- Families used to move between their various properties a lot, requiring furniture to be portable, so chests and trunks usually had domed lids in order to throw off water during travel [p86].

- The aspidestra features prominently in Victorian photographs because it was the only flower which was immune to the effects of the gas which leaked from the lights [p184].

- The diamond pattern of different-coloured bricks used for decoration in a wall is called a diaper, from which the baby's undergarment - originally made from linen threads woven in a diamond pattern - gets its name [p291].

- Rats have sex up to twenty times a day [p348].

- The first person in America to slice potatoes lengthwise and fry them was Thomas Jefferson [p126].

- The expression "sleep tight" comes from the requirement to tighten the supporting lattice of ropes in a bed when they began to sag [p456].

- Buttons under the sleeve near the cuff of a jacket are the last relic of a fashion for attaching (useless) buttons in decorative patterns all over a coat [p538].

- In the face of objections to run a railway line through the middle of Stonehenge in the 19th century, an official pointed out that the site was "entirely out of repair, and not the slightest use to anyone now" [p615].

These are just a few of the interesting facts you'll learn (along with a few things you probably already knew - such as why British people are known as 'limeys') from this book. It's ostensibly inspired by the author wandering through the rooms of his house - hall, kitchen, dining room, bedroom and many more (it's a big house) - and using each location as a starting point for burrowing back in time, unearthing anecdotes, facts and biographies of personalities who contributed to making our world the way it is, and presenting them in his characteristic, pleasantly familiar discursive style.

Sometimes the connections between the location and the story appear tenuous: for example, the (truly fascinating) story of the building of the Eiffel Tower arises when in the passage between the kitchen and the rest of the house, as does an account of the inventions and character of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. In other places the link is more explicit: thus, visiting the bathroom brings forth a history of ablution, cleanliness and disease - particularly smallpox, which I (yet again) didn't know was named to distinguish it from the great pox, or syphilis.

Bryson has a teacher's gift for telling you things you didn't know (or want to know, such as infant mortality rates, or that flushing a toilet with the lid up "spews billions of microbes into the air") in an engaging fashion. His writing here lacks much of the humour which is on show in his other books, probably because that's usually employed in describing himself in a self-deprecating fashion, or his encounters with other people. Here, the author stays in the background, gently pointing out one intriguing vista after another. To be sure, not all discourses are successful, but it's a big book (belying its title) with a well-stocked bibliography and index, indicating the breadth and depth of the author's homework (hah!). Recommended.

Imagine, if you please, that you are a teenager visiting an elderly uncle at his country estate. When he offers to show you around his home, you accept his suggestion out of politeness, although you suspect that he will turn out to be a bore. By the end of the day, you have seen all the rooms and – contrary to your expectations – Uncle Bill has completely captivated you with his stories!

This is no ordinary uncle. Bill Bryson is a well-known American-English journalist and author, whose repertoire spans popular science, architecture, geography, history and much else. In this book, he turns his gaze towards the rooms in his own residence – and regales the reader with stories inspired by each of them.

The house described in this book was built by Thomas Marsham, an English clergyman in 1851 (exactly a hundred years before the birth of the author). Not surprisingly, we learn a lot about Victorian England – be it the Crystal Palace built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 or the stately homes of the aristocracy, with their grand gardens and armies of domestic staff. But there was a flip side too: “In twelve years eight railway termini opened in London. The scale of disruption – the trenches, the muddy excavations, the congestion of wagons and other vehicles, the smoke, the din, the clutter – that came from filling the city with railways, bridges, sewers, pumping stations, power stations, underground lines and all the rest meant that Victorian London was not just the biggest city in the world, but the noisiest, foulest, muddiest, busiest, most choked and dug-over place the world had ever seen.”

The preceding era of the Industrial Revolution had been even worse, as the following excerpts from Chapter 18 will reveal: “For those dependent on casual labour, existence was an endless lottery. One-third of the inhabitants of Central London were estimated in 1750 to go to bed each night ‘almost Pennyless’ and the proportion only worsened as time went on. Casual labourers seldom knew when they woke in the morning whether they would earn enough that day to eat…”

The author does not confine himself to the British Isles. We learn quite a bit about American history; including details of Monticello and Mount Vernon, the cherished homes built by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington respectively. We are also informed about the many varieties of plants which were taken from the New World to the Old: “… the azalea, aster, camellia, catalpa, euphorbia, hydrangea, rhododendron, rudbeckia, Virginia creeper, wild cherry and many types of ferns, shrubs, trees and vines.”

As for India, Chapter 8 talks about spices and Chapter 17 discusses cotton farming. To my mind, the most interesting part of the book is the connection between India, China and America, whose destinies were tied together by the unlikely trio of opium, tea and sugar.

At first glance, it appears that the book is just disjointed trivia. But more details emerge as one proceeds from one chapter to the next and the reader realizes that Bryson is much more than a connoisseur of trivia. This book is not only a comprehensive social history, but it also contains valuable biographical material on dozens of famous persons – including Thomas Edison, Gustave Eiffel, Charles Darwin, Alexander Graham Bell and the Italian architect Palladio.

The author displays both wit and wisdom in this book. Consider, for example, the following description of Eiffel Tower: “Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent and gloriously pointless at the same time.”

To summarise, this is a wonderful book, from which each reader will find something to learn and to treasure.