About the Book
In this new and exciting edition of A Really Short History Of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson narrates the history and evolution of scientific discoveries that explain, among other things, how and why we exist.
Summary Of The Book
This edition of A Really Short History Of Nearly Everything is a special abridged edition, adapted to meet the needs of a younger readership. It’s a book whose subject matter was inspired by an incident that occurred in Bill’s childhood. One day, when he was about ten or eleven years old, he was sitting with an old, roughed up science textbook. This book had an illustration which immediately captured his attention. It was a picture of the earth, with one-fourth of it cut away, and showing how the inside of the earth would appear if it was ever cut in this fashion. Bill recalls thinking how anyone could have known that.
Bill’s major inspiration for writing this book, however, came from the fact that he was dissatisfied with his grasp on science. He felt distant from the subject through all of his schooling years, and thought that his teachers and textbooks never really delved into the hows and whys, robbing the process of learning science with its passion.
A Really Short History Of Nearly Everything infuses passion into learning science. It talks about the who and how of the various prominent scientific discoveries, and is ably guided by Bill’s great skill of storytelling, thereby making this content accessible to people of all ages.
In this edition, Bill writes about the mysteries of space and time, the eccentricity and obsessive methods used by idiosyncratic scientists, the wacko theories that were believed to be true for very long, and the scientific discoveries that came about as an accident when people were actually looking for something entirely different or were thinking about it all wrong. The book also talks about the deep aspects of science, as it were, such as the existence of the universe, and how life emerged on our planet earth.
The book is humorous and makes the big scientific theories of the past and present accessible even to the young minds.
A Really Short History Of Nearly Everything generally received positive reviews, mainly on the grounds that the content was entertaining, well written, and informative. It received the EU Descartes Prize and the Aventis Prize.
About The Author-
Bill Bryson is an author.
He is the author of other titles such as Neither Here Nor There, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, Notes from a Small Island, Made in America, The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America and Mother Tongue: The English Language.
Bill was born in Iowa. He studied for two years at Drake University before dropping out. He decided instead to travel to Europe for the next four months. He, however, returned to college and completed his degree. Then, he moved to Britain and worked as a journalist for many years. Back in US in the year 1995, he began writing books regularly. He is the recipient of the James Joyce Award, the President’s Award, and the Golden Eagle Award.