A Short History of Nearly Everything

Lots of great little nuggets of knowledge in this book - almost too much to take in and remember properly. If I'd been thinking of it at the beginning, I would've highlighted the interesting stuff as I went so that I could go back and easily remember/find it later.. but since I didn't I may have to read this again someday.

The first half I was able to keep going through the slower parts no problem because of the anticipation of more knowledge, but by the 2nd half the clever stories seemed to be less and less and it was more and more stats, data, etc and I found myself losing interest.

It could also have been due to a baby who didn't want to sleep and so I was reading it on little to no sleep. :)

I listened to this book on audible, narrated by Richard Matthews which was awesome. The narrator did a great job and was very enjoyable to listen to. The book itself took on a tall order, nearly everything is a lot of stuff. But I felt it was neatly organized and told a great story and managed to do it with some humor.

My take aways from the book were that we are far less certain about the things we know about the world than I was led to believe and that a surprising amount of things we've learned were learned really quite recently.

This book is a fantastic review of all things scientific, basically covering what scientists know about our world and Universe for the non-scientist reader. Bryson goes into histories of what we know about geology, chemistry, physics, and biology just to name a few. As someone who hasn't really had the chance to take a science class in my adult life, I really appreciated this book and recommend it to everyone.


My final takeaway from the book (besides the many, many ways life as we know it can come to an end) is that there is still so much we still haven't discovered.. Nearly every chapter states something similar. We don't know much about the Universe yet. We don't know much about the atom. We don't know much about the depths of the ocean. We don't know why there were periods of mass extinction or exactly how homo sapiens evolved from other homo species. This is actually encouraging in a way. There is still much to be discovered. If you're young and considering becoming a scientist, by all means, do it!