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By Rome Jorge, Lifestyle Editor
Bill Bryson is a superbly funny scholar, able to
deliver loads of information and trivia in the most entertaining and
humorous fashion. He sugarcoats potent data with fun and we’re
better for having read him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is
no exception. You’ll breeze through its 560 pages filled with bona
fide heavyweight science—everything from plate tectonics to
evolution to electro magnetism to quantum mechanics—like a kid
gorging on peanuts. You can’t put it down till you’re done.
The language he uses is easy to understand for
the common man. It’s peanuts. There’s more than a dash humor in
every page to lighten up one’s heavy pondering. But these alone do
not explain his book’s appeal. So how does Bryson deliver science
as entertainment?
He does gossip, heartache, scandal and intrigue.
He dishes the dirt on the scientists behind the discoveries. He
delivers back-stories on every science textbook lesson. Bryson
reveals the unhappy and unsung, the bitter rivalries, the losers,
the credit grabbers and the jerks in white robes as well as the
martyrs and heroes of science and truth. He makes reading science
history a guilty pleasure every bit as delicious as peeking at a
salacious tabloid.
More importantly, he humanizes the business of
science. He makes one appreciate the sacrifices over the last few
thousand years to accrue all the cumulative knowledge. We owe it to
all of them—scientists from the time of Archimedes to Stephen
Hawkings—to learn about their discoveries as well as their lives.
The book also explores how cultural norms and
scientific discovery affect one another. Bryson examples how during
colonial times, white hunters drove countless species to extinction
by shooting as many of them for sport and contrasts it to today’s
environmental ethics.
This book is especially relevant in the
Information Age when sifting through the glut of disinformation and
cultural garbage often leads to sensory overload. As religious
zealots and shysters flood the Internet and bookshelves with
pseudoscience and other hogwash such as Creationism and The Secret,
it’s refreshing that a book reintroduces scientific discovery as a
basic human endeavor and rationality as a key to our continued
survival.
With this book, the reader sees himself and any
other true believer in science and truth as heirs to generations of
scientists. Having exposed their humanity—flaws and all—Bill
Bryson puts the scientific geniuses at the same level as the rest of
us. Having read A Short History of Nearly Everything, the true
believer—of science, that is—is inspired to carry on the
essential work of knowing the empirical truth.
This is a must read book. Everything depends on
it.
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