Overview
Bryson, a travel writer with no formal science training, spent three years interviewing scientists and reading textbooks in order to understand how we know what we know about the universe, Earth, and life itself.
Bryson had built a career as a humorous travel writer (Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods) before deciding, by his own admission, that he didn't really understand science. The book published in 2003 was his attempt to fix that, and it became one of the most successful popular science books of the decade. It won the Aventis Prize for Science Books in 2004.
Key Ideas
Scientific knowledge is recent
Almost everything we know about the universe has been discovered in the last hundred years.
The absurd improbability of life
The number of coincidences required for a human being to exist is genuinely staggering when you stop to count them.
Earth is weirder than taught
Plate tectonics, supervolcanoes, magnetic reversals — the planet we live on is far more active and unpredictable than schoolbook geology suggests.
Scientists are people
Much of the book is gently funny portraiture of the scientists whose quirks and feuds shaped what we now know.
We know almost nothing
The book's most honest lesson is how much remains unknown at the edges of every field it covers.
Who should read this
Readers who want a single accessible volume on how we know what we know. Bryson's outsider's-eye view is an advantage; he explains things in the terms someone encountering them for the first time would use. Particularly good for intelligent non-scientists who want to feel less lost in conversations about cosmology or geology.
Who might skip it
Skip if you have a working science background — you'll find the book introductory. Skip also if you want cutting-edge research; the book is from 2003 and fields including genetics, exoplanet science, and climate modelling have moved significantly since.
The verdict
The best-written general-audience science tour I have read. Bryson's humour never gets in the way of the science, and his portraits of scientists (Henry Cavendish, Thomas Midgley) are among the best things in the book. Not a textbook and not trying to be one; a grand guided tour that rewards the lay reader.
To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune.
— Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
If you liked this
The Body by Bryson, same style applied to human anatomy. A Brief History of Time for the harder physics.