Summer Reading

I didn’t exactly sleep my way through high school and college science classes, but it’s safe to say I don’t remember a lot of the specific details of what I was taught. From primordial nothingness to this very moment, Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything aims is to help people like me, who tired of 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.

What Bryson’s explanations and descriptions lack in sophisitication, they more than make up in wit and style. I’ve described it on occasion as Carl Sagan meets Robin Williams.

There are definitely some mistakes, and any scientist reading this would be embarressed on occasion for Bryson. On the other hand I have to absolutely recommend the book if you’d like to brush up on your history of the natural world for Trivial Pursuit and have a good chuckle in the process.

Bryson’s next job should be training high school science teachers.

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