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3.93 AVERAGE
3.93 AVERAGE
Wandering through the history of the home, Bill Bryson style, At Home, incorporates information about cosmetics, brick-making, Roman baths, Ice Man, and much, much more. It's 532 pages of facts, and somehow it all works. Bryson could write about nothing, and it would be something.
3.5/5 - Writing through the rooms seemed arbitrary at time with what information was presented when (and left me confused on how we got to talking about certain historical fun facts that didn’t pertain at all to homes) but in the end, still an insightful read to the history of homes and the activities done within
This book is divided into chapters themed on the different rooms of a house, but we don't stay home for long. In the chapter on the study, for example, he talks about bats used in warfare and crop-destroying locusts. In the chapter on the dining room, we follow European explorers around the world and learn about scurvy. In the chapter on the garden, we learn about the history of cemeteries and the creation of New York's Central Park. The house is just a framework for Bryson to talk about lots of things that interest him.
informative
slow-paced
I'm going to call this one 3.5 stars, because I'm indecisive by nature. On the one hand, as all Bryson's books I have read, it is replete with delightful tidbits. The breadth is pretty astounding when you take a step back: mousetraps, cemetery ground levels rising, making bootblack, syphilis, grave robbers, telephones and gas lighting, Palladio and the White House, and the list goes on. William Morris poisoned people with his color choices, y'all! The average 19th c. bedding weighed 80 pounds! On the other hand, it gets a little challenging to hold all these alluring loose ends together after meandering through a dozen rooms of the house. I think the logic may have been more obvious to Bryson himself, since he organized the book around his own (no doubt gorgeous) English home. For me, it read like a laundry list of fascinating trivia that might have been better as a series of feature articles than a book.
Bill Bryson is a masterful writer of very funny and informative prose, that's undoubted. I do wish this book was rather broader than mostly just British history, and I wish he clarified that almost every time he says "first time" or other such phrases he means "in Western Europe and the US". Still there were some passages that made me actually giggle and I enjoyed it overall!
"It was ok" describes my feelings quite well. There were interesting bits, but the structure of the book doesn't really work. Going through the history of homes room by room sounds like a good idea, but the result feels like a list of loosely related facts.
The book also makes huge leaps in time and sometimes it is difficult to understand, why the story jumps from stone age to 1800th century, skipping everything between.
The book also makes huge leaps in time and sometimes it is difficult to understand, why the story jumps from stone age to 1800th century, skipping everything between.
As usual, Bill Bryson is pretty much the only nonfiction writer that keeps me interested in the subject matter until the very end. At Home is full of little nuggets of information that are great for collectors of trivia (so that's why we say "sleep tight!"). He also humanizes the men and women who would be merely names and dates on a page in most history books. Parts of the kitchen and dining room chapters lost me for a while, but the chapters on the bedroom, bathroom, and nursery made up for it.
You can't read this book without gaining an appreciation for just how easy we've got it these days!
You can't read this book without gaining an appreciation for just how easy we've got it these days!
It's Bill Bryson; you're gonna get some rambling.
His voice is so excellent- that's what makes this.
His voice is so excellent- that's what makes this.
Others might have better luck with this as a reference book, opened only when you have a sudden urge to learn about bathrooms, but I read it cover to cover. Surprisingly, it tied rather neatly into my dissertation research too!
This is a fun, fascinating book about our modern age and how it got here - and got into our homes.
Bryson uses his own English country home as a framework for exploring innovations and history - and even words - in our everyday lives. From the food in your kitchen to sex and health in your bedroom to entertaining in the drawing room, Bryson explores the innovations and innovators.
The framework breaks down here and there - the attic for a look at science? - but on the whole, it's an entertaining series of anecdotes and ah-ha moments.
More reviews at my WordPress site, Ralphsbooks.
Bryson uses his own English country home as a framework for exploring innovations and history - and even words - in our everyday lives. From the food in your kitchen to sex and health in your bedroom to entertaining in the drawing room, Bryson explores the innovations and innovators.
The framework breaks down here and there - the attic for a look at science? - but on the whole, it's an entertaining series of anecdotes and ah-ha moments.
More reviews at my WordPress site, Ralphsbooks.