The book is mistitled; it should be called “a brief survey of scientific discovery: 2003.” my complaint is the misrepresentation of “history”.
On the bright side, Bryson does an excellent job of careening through known factoids and briefly explaining how they are known or why they are supposed. He does a passable job of amalgamating philosophy, narrative, and encyclopedic fact into a 544-page book. Still, it becomes fairly obvious why nobody has done it before. In the words of Nicholas Carr “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” The common Twitter complaint that real information can’t be conveyed in 160 characters or less applies here. He makes clear sacrifices for this condensation and I’m not sure the overall effect is positive.
As far as knowledge was concerned, my favorite parts of the book were when he was discussing things I knew little to nothing about (geology for example), but when he was talking about things I’d spent any length of time studying (physics), it became tiresome to hear oversimplification and generally just skipping the good parts! With that in mind, this might be a good book for somebody who knows very little about most of science, but would like to.
The philosophy was generally sophomoric but not entirely uninteresting, take this piece for example. “It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.” on the other hand you constantly have to deal with doltish pontifications like “It is easy to overlook the thought that life just is. As humans, we are inclined to feel that life must have a point.”
The narrative is my biggest pain point. Bryson approaches the past from the top of the mountain looking down and regularly laughs at the past. For example, take this smirking jab at the past “(Percival Lowell) is most indelibly remembered for his belief that Mars was covered with canals built by industrious Martians for purposes of conveying water from polar regions to the dry but productive lands nearer the equator.” I’m a sucker for dry British humor, but in my book, you’re only allowed to laugh at others if you can laugh at yourself. In my mind, Bill Bryson failed to meet that mark. “Of course we have no prospect of such a journey. A trip of 240,000 miles to the Moon still represents a very big undertaking for us. A manned mission to Mars, called for by the first President Bush in a moment of passing giddiness, was quietly dropped when someone worked out that it would cost $450 billion and probably result in the deaths of all the crew.” He was arrogantly far from the mark [link to the martian].
Returning to my original statement about an accurate title, History takes you along for the ride. You have to philosophize with Socrates in Athens, contemplate mortality with Augustine in Rome, and charge the french with “we band of brothers” on St. Crispin’s day. If the past is a foreign place, I’m afraid Bryson comes off as an ugly tourist.