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I have just finished reading one of my Christmas presents, Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. The book is quite weighty, at 570 odd pages long, but it is actually surprisingly easy and enjoyable to read… if you like numbers. And this book is full of some very large, and very small numbers, as the author tries to emphasis just how vast a place the universe is, or how small an atom is.

Although it contains a lot of interesting throwaway statistics, it never goes into any real depth. I suppose this is what makes it easy to read. I for one wouldn’t enjoy reading a book solely on the evolution of the ape, but a light chapter on the subject is interesting. The book therefore delivers on the title, and provides a short history. It also covers a pretty comprehensive scope, as far as one book can and still be readable, so it fulfils the second criteria of the title too.

The writing style is easy to read, but I didn’t find it laboured the point, even in areas where I already knew the subject. My main criticism of the book is that it provokes far more questions than it answers, but maybe that is not a bad thing for an inquisitive mind. I will just have to read more…

This entry was posted on Thursday 11th August 2005 in Blog and tagged books, review, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.