I've been listening to a great book! It's Bill
Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. When you read the summary, you might think that this is sounding a little dry, but it
is great, seriously! The author reads the CD himself and has a great voice, is very witty and dry. It's been a lot of fun traveling through the universe with Mr.
Bryson - check it out for yourself! If you are interested, we also have this on
Playaway (that's a self contained audio book!).
Here's the blurb:
Bill
Bryson is one of the world’s most beloved and bestselling writers. In
A Short History of Nearly Everything, he takes his ultimate journey–into the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer. It’s a dazzling quest, the intellectual odyssey of a lifetime, as this insatiably curious writer attempts to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. Or, as the author puts it, “…how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since.” This is, in short, a tall order.
To that end, Bill
Bryson apprenticed himself to a host of the world’s most profound scientific minds, living and dead. His challenge is to take subjects like geology,
chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics and see if there
isn’t some way to render them comprehensible to people, like himself, made bored (or scared) stiff of science by school. His interest is not simply to discover
what we know but to find out
how we know it. How do we know what is in the center of the earth, thousands of miles beneath the surface? How can we know the extent and the composition of the universe, or what a black hole is? How can we know where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out?
On his travels through space and time, Bill
Bryson encounters a splendid gallery of the most fascinating, eccentric, competitive, and foolish personalities ever to ask a hard question. In their company, he undertakes a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only this superb writer can render it. Science has never been more involving, and the world we inhabit has never been fuller of wonder and delight.
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