Take a photo of a barcode or cover
lynniekate 's review for:
A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
informative
lighthearted
slow-paced
This book will blow your mind! 🤯
Quotes:
- We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.
- “But the thing is, most of the time bad things don’t happen. Rocks don’t fall. Earthquakes don’t occur. New vents don’t suddenly open up. For all the instability, it’s mostly remarkably and amazingly tranquil.”
- It is sometimes called the Great Swine Flu epidemic and sometimes the Great Spanish Flu epidemic, but in either case it was ferocious. World War I killed twenty-one million people in four years; swine flu did the same in its first four months. Almost 80 percent of American casualties in the First World War came not from enemy fire, but from flu. In some units the mortality rate was as high as 80 percent.
- Schools closed, public entertainments were shut down, people everywhere wore masks. It did little good. Between the autumn of 1918 and spring of the following year, 548,452 people died of the flu in America.
- No one can rule out the possibility that the Great Swine Flu epidemic might once again rear its head.
- If you look around you on a bus or in a park or cafe or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William the Conquerer or the Mayflower Pilgrims, you should answer at once: “Me, too!” In the most literal and fundamental sense we are all family.
- To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
- We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally modern human beings - that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities - have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth’s history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.
Quotes:
- We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.
- “But the thing is, most of the time bad things don’t happen. Rocks don’t fall. Earthquakes don’t occur. New vents don’t suddenly open up. For all the instability, it’s mostly remarkably and amazingly tranquil.”
- It is sometimes called the Great Swine Flu epidemic and sometimes the Great Spanish Flu epidemic, but in either case it was ferocious. World War I killed twenty-one million people in four years; swine flu did the same in its first four months. Almost 80 percent of American casualties in the First World War came not from enemy fire, but from flu. In some units the mortality rate was as high as 80 percent.
- Schools closed, public entertainments were shut down, people everywhere wore masks. It did little good. Between the autumn of 1918 and spring of the following year, 548,452 people died of the flu in America.
- No one can rule out the possibility that the Great Swine Flu epidemic might once again rear its head.
- If you look around you on a bus or in a park or cafe or any crowded place, most of the people you see are very probably relatives. When someone boasts to you that he is descended from William the Conquerer or the Mayflower Pilgrims, you should answer at once: “Me, too!” In the most literal and fundamental sense we are all family.
- To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
- We have arrived at this position of eminence in a stunningly short time. Behaviorally modern human beings - that is, people who can speak and make art and organize complex activities - have existed for only about 0.0001 percent of Earth’s history. But surviving for even that little while has required a nearly endless string of good fortune.