A Blog About (Nearly) Everything
Book Review: Bill Bryson, "A Short History of Nearly Everything", Black Swan, 2016. "Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so." (p. 20) Bill Bryson wants us to know how lucky we are to be here today, given that most of the universe is dead and most of the species that have lived on Earth are extinct. As he writes in the introduction, the book is "about how it happened -- in particular, how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also some of what happened in between and since" (p. 20). No wonder the book is titled A Short History of Nearly Everything . Part of the author's motivation for w...