'At Home: A Short History of Private Life' by Bill Bryson takes readers on a journey through history via one house built in an improbably important year of 1851. Bryson uses his own English country home as a framework for exploring innovations and history in everyday life, from domestic inventions to the history of archaeology, child labor to the plight of country parsons. Each room in his home represents different concepts to be discussed, such as health and cleanliness in the bathroom, child labor in the nursery, and innovations in the kitchen. Bryson's writing style is described as chatty, engaging, and very interesting, making the book a fascinating read full of obscure facts and history.
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From The Publisher:
From one of the most beloved authors of our time-more than six million copies of his books have been sold in this country alone-a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home.
"Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up."
Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to "write a history of the world without leaving home." The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutrition and the spice trade; and so on, as Bryson shows how each has fig-ured in the evolution of private life. Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.
Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and he is a master at turning the seemingly isolated or mundane fact into an occasion for the most diverting exposi-tion imaginable. His wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life.
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2 comment(s)
A veces me da la sensacion de que estoy leyendo la Wikipedia y moviendome de pagina a pagina segun me van interesando temas.
Pero me gusta hacer eso de hecho con la Wikipedia asi que para mi es perfecto.
Algunos temas los conocia como la influencia del te o el tema de las especias. Otros han sido totalmente sorpresa como todo lo relacionado con paisajes o casa absurdas.
Es entretenido, cambiando de tema constantemente, un nuevo enlace en la Wikipedia..
This is another book by Bryson that I have read, and it is as good as every of the previous ones.
Bryson has an extraordinary gift for telling interesting stories. He can turn even the most boring subject into something really fascinating. His history is anecdotes, curiosities, scandals from the old days, funny coincidences. And all this is told in his characteristic tone - playful and slightly ironic. He can really interest me in topics that usually bore me.
This time Bryson looked at his home in the English countryside. It was an excuse to tell so many different stories. From why houses look the way they do today, through the history of the people who live in them, to inventions that are well known to us today and the history of furniture. It is a very varied collage of themes, and Bryson moves smoothly from one topic to another.
I don't know if I will remember much of this book. It's not Bryson's fault, that's the way it is with books like this. But one thing is for sure, I had a great time reading and I will certainly read more books by this author.
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At Home: A Short History of Private Life?
About the Author:
BILL BRYSON's bestselling books include A Walk in the Woods, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and A Short History of Nearly Everything (which won the Aventis Prize in Britain and the Descartes Prize, the European Union's highest literary award). He was…
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