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	List Price: $27.50 Our Price: $17.24 Your Save: $ 10.26 ( 37% ) Availability: N/A Manufacturer: Broadway
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Binding: Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number: 500 Format: Bargain Price Label: Broadway Manufacturer: Broadway Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 560 Publication Date: 2003-05-06 Publisher: Broadway Release Date: 2003-05-06 Studio: Broadway
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Editorial Reviews: Bill Bryson is one of the world’s most beloved and bestselling writers. In A Short History of Nearly Everything, he takes his ultimate journey–into the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer. It’s a dazzling quest, the intellectual odyssey of a lifetime, as this insatiably curious writer attempts to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. Or, as the author puts it, “…how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since.” This is, in short, a tall order. To that end, Bill Bryson apprenticed himself to a host of the world’s most profound scientific minds, living and dead. His challenge is to take subjects like geology, chemisty, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics and see if there isn’t some way to render them comprehensible to people, like himself, made bored (or scared) stiff of science by school. His interest is not simply to discover what we know but to find out how we know it. How do we know what is in the center of the earth, thousands of miles beneath the surface? How can we know the extent and the composition of the universe, or what a black hole is? How can we know where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through space and time, Bill Bryson encounters a splendid gallery of the most fascinating, eccentric, competitive, and foolish personalities ever to ask a hard question. In their company, he undertakes a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only this superb writer can render it. Science has never been more involving, and the world we inhabit has never been fuller of wonder and delight.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: My Desert Island Book Comment: Bryson's sparkling style cinches this as one of my top 10 books ever. It seems some scientific types are upset that Bryson delves into the lives of scientists making discoveries more than the discoveries themselves. This is his brilliance! If I want to learn everything there is to know about any given scientific discovery (I don't), I can go read the discoverer's undoubtedly dry treatise on it. I'd much rather learn about how this person came to make such a discovery. It's called human interest, which is something Bryson excels at. Customer Rating: Summary: Simple, but Good Comment: A very curt and well-presented glimpse of what science has taught us. Recommend this for any non-scientist who is curious and all young and aspiring scientists. Customer Rating: Summary: Very enjoyable! Absorbing topics, well written Comment: Bill Bryson is an incredibly engaging and charming writer, so he could have written a book of carpet samples and made it interesting. Combine his talents with a smorgasboard of science and history -- all about where we came from and why we think we know what we do -- and you get an irresistible book. My only complaint was that my interests weren't *exactly* aligned with his, so I felt like too much time was spent on taxonomy (classifying everything from animals and rocks to geological epochs) at the expense of more theoretical sciences like physics and biochemistry. "Cosmos" is much more satisfying in that respect. But a perfect alignment of interests can't really be expected in a book of such broad scope, and it was still a lot of fun. Customer Rating: Summary: A Must Read Comment: Too many are ignorant of the wonders of scientific developments. Bill Bryson makes the story of our lives a fascinating and enjoyable tale; one from which anyone will gain. His humor and incredibly thorough research makes this book one of the most worthwhile I have read in a long while. It was amazing to find myself laughing out loud during an otherwise thoughtful scientific dissertation. Encourage your students, children and friends to read this. Customer Rating: Summary: Required Reading Comment: This is absolutely one of the best books I've ever read. It should be translated into every language and made required reading in every high school in the world. A supurb piece of work that the author should be proud of.