A Short History of Nearly Everything

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

You are the end of an unbroken streak of luck that is almost too long to believe. The right orbit around the sun, a collision that gave Earth a moon of exactly the right size, and a line of ancestors stretching back billions of years in which not one link ever failed. As Bill Bryson puts it, not one of them was “squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment” — the only possible sequence of combinations that could result, eventually and all too briefly, in you. Against that, 99.99% of all species that ever lived are extinct. Bryson’s project is to tell the story of how we came to know all this, and to make science, so often written dryly, feel like the adventure it actually is.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

You are an improbable machine built from unremarkable parts. It takes 59 elements to assemble a human, though 99% of you is just carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. One group priced the raw materials at $151,578; another at $168. The number barely matters, because no one can turn the ingredients into a person. The real miracle isn’t the materials — it’s the cellular coordination that makes you conscious, self-repairing, and linked by DNA to a lineage billions of years deep. Bill Bryson’s tour of the body keeps circling one uncomfortable fact: much of what feels settled about how you work is still educated guessing.

Bill Bryson on SummaryShelf

A Short History of Nearly Everything

The Body: A Guide for Occupants