Books by Bill Bryson

 

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. Though A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as "The Size of the Earth" and "Life Itself." Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Life and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it's when Bryson dives into some of science's best and most embarrassing fights--Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould--that he finds literary gold. --Therese Littleton - Amazon.com Hardcover from Broadway

Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words by Bill Bryson Hardcover from Broadway

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson Paperback from Broadway

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson Paperback from Avon

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson Paperback from Avon 1991

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away by Bill Bryson Paperback from Broadway

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson Paperback from Perennial 1990

Made in America by Bill Bryson Paperback from Avon

Bill Bryson's African Diary by Bill Bryson Hardcover from Broadway

Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe by Bill Bryson Paperback from Avon

The Best American Travel Writing 2000 by Jason Wilson, Bill Bryson Paperback from Houghton Mifflin Co

Frühstück mit Kängurus : Australische Abenteuer by Bill Bryson Paperback from New Media German Language

Notes From A Big Country by Bill Bryson Hardcover from Doubleday Canada Out of Print

A Walk in the Woods : Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson Bill Bryson has made a living out of traveling and then writing about it. In The Lost Continent he re-created the road trips of his childhood; in Neither Here nor There he retraced the route he followed as a young backpacker traversing Europe. When this American transplant to Britain decided to return home, he made a farewell walking tour of the British countryside and produced Notes from a Small Island. Once back on American soil and safely settled in New Hampshire, Bryson once again hears the siren call of the open road--only this time it's a trail. The Appalachian Trail, to be exact. In A Walk in the Woods Bill Bryson tackles what is, for him, an entirely new subject: the American wilderness. Accompanied only by his old college buddy Stephen Katz, Bryson starts out one March morning in north Georgia, intending to walk the entire 2,100 miles to trail's end atop Maine's Mount Katahdin.  If nothing else, A Walk in the Woods is proof positive that the journey is the destination. As Bryson and Katz haul their out-of-shape, middle-aged butts over hill and dale, the reader is treated to both a very funny personal memoir and a delightful chronicle of the trail, the people who created it, and the places it passes through. Whether you plan to make a trip like this one yourself one day or only care to read about it, A Walk in the Woods is a great way to spend an afternoon. --Alix Wilber - Amazon.com Paperback from Broadway