Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything is such a good read, I almost don't want to review it - I just want to talk about it. When you suddenly find yourself in possession of a brain teeming with fascinating facts about the universe and our world, you don't want to sit and think critically. I mean - look - let me just give you a sampling of my newfound knowledge:
- The human body consists of about one quadrillion human cells and 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. We're really just a small part of the bacteria that inhabit us.
- Deep inside oceans are ocean vents that release huge amounts of heat into the water. The temperature of the water immediately around these vents is some 40F hotter than the water just a few inches away. Some species of worms live near these vents, such that their heads are in hot water while their tails are in cold water.
- If your pillow is just six years old, then ONE TENTH of its weight comes from dead skin, live mites, dead mites and mite dung. Clean pillowcases make no difference.
- Nobody knows how many species of anything there are. Insects? Estimates range from 50,000 species to 600,000. Fungi - 20,000 to millions. They can't even agree on the number of species of hominids. Not only that, people don't even agree on how many known species of anything there are. There isn't one single claim that isn't contradicted by someone else. This stuff is batshit.
Now tell me how to think critically about this book while I'm busy freaking out about my definitely-older-than-six-years pillows. Ah, the lot of a writer. You take a deep breath (well away from any pillows) and move on.
Ever read a book that was ridiculously entertaining, highly informative and just all-round fabulous - and then wondered at the end of it, "Now what was that all about?" That's ASHoNE for you in a nutshell. I will rave about this book till the day I die, and yet, I am uncomfortably aware that what the book really is is not what it pretends to be; it contains more cocktail-party anecdotes than actual science.
At the beginning of the book, Bryson talks about the first time he got excited about science - which was when he saw that familiar illustration that graced all our science text books: the one that shows a cross-section of the earth, complete with cutaway layers all the way down to the core. Bryson eagerly opens his text book looking for more information. Instead:
[H]ere's the thing. It wasn't exciting at all. It wasn't actually altogether comprehensible. Above all, it didn't answer any of the questions that the illustration stirred up in a normal inquiring mind: How did we end up with a Sun in the middle of our planet? And if it is burning away down there, why isn't the ground under our feet hot to the touch? And why isn't the rest of the interior melting - or is it? And when the core at last burns itself out, will some of the Earth slump into the void, leaving a giant sinkhole on the surface? And how do you know this? How did you figure it out?
He laments -
There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a longdistance phone call from the frankly interesting.
And yet, throughout his own mammoth tome, he fails his own test. Bryson is a master at ferreting out interesting personalities in the history of science and painting us colourful little portraits of them, so unlike most text books his work is anything but boring. But at the end of nearly 300 trade-paperback-sized pages, our science questions remain fundamentally unanswered. All too often, Bryson is happy to gloss over the details with a breezy, "It's not altogether comprehensible, but it's splendid, splendid stuff. Trust me." Dude, enquiring minds want to know!
It seems there are also certain factual errors in this book, though most reviews by scienctists suggest that the numbers of errors is not overlarge for a book that is not a book of rigorous science.
The deficiencies all pale in comarison to the sheer awesomeness, however. In any case, all my problems with the book could be remedied by simply changing the title, or perhaps adding a subtitle like: The FUN Way To Look At It All. It's full of brilliant nuggets of information that I find wildly amusing... and it certainly doesn't hurt being able to impress people at cocktail parties.
No comments:
Post a Comment