chrysemys 's review for:

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

3.0

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This is a book for a novice in the sciences, and I think it does a pretty good job in that capacity while managing also to be entertaining. However, as a person with a fairly strong background in earth and life sciences, I found myself getting impatient with a lot of the book- like sitting through a joke when you already know the punchline. Other sections- the ones that dealt with cosmology, quantum physics and subatomic particles- were completely incomprehensible-- not because Bryson failed as a journalist but because the concepts themselves are beyond most people. I almost wonder why he bothered to include this material. I had some misgivings about the imprecision of his language in places (eg something like "life wants to continue" would be much more accurately expressed as "life has a strong tendency to continue") that a layman may or may not pick up on. I did, however, enjoy the biographical material on scientists and discoverers.