An illustrated edition of the bestselling book from Bill Bryson.
This is Bryson's quest to discover everything that happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. On his travels through time and space, he encounters a diverse collection of eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish, who solved many problems, such as the weight of the Earth, but failed to tell anybody about many of his findings.
Praise for Short History of Nearly Everything:
&l`The prose is just as one would expect - energetic, quirky, familiar and humorous. Bryson's great skill is that of lightly holding the reader's hand throughout; building up such trust that topics as recondite as atomic weights, relativity and particle physics are shorn of their terrors. It's hard to imagine a better rough guide to science.'&o; John Waller, The Guardian
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. He settled in England in 1977, and lived for many years with his English wife and four children in North Yorkshire. He and his family then moved to America for a few years but have now returned to the UK. He succeeded Sir Peter Ustinov as Chancellor of the University of Durham in April 2005. His bestsellers include The Lost Continent, Neither Here Nor There, Notes From a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, Down Under and, most recently, A Short History of Nearly Everything which won the Aventis Prize for Science Books in 2004.