Technical Details
- ISBN13: 9780767919388
- Condition: New
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Product Description
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 figured 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 exposition imaginable. His wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2010: Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) turns his attention from science to society in his authoritative history of domesticity, At Home: A Short History of Private Life. While walking through his own home, a former Church of England rectory built in the 19th century, Bryson reconstructs the fascinating history of the household, room by room. With waggish humor and a knack for unearthing the extraordinary stories behind the seemingly commonplace, he examines how everyday items--things like ice, cookbooks, glass windows, and salt and pepper--transformed the way people lived, and how houses evolved around these new commodities. "Houses are really quite odd things," Bryson writes, and, luckily for us, he is a writer who thrives on oddities. He gracefully draws connections between an eclectic array of events that have affected home life, covering everything from the relationship between cholera outbreaks and modern landscaping, to toxic makeup, highly flammable hoopskirts, and other unexpected hazards of fashion. Fans of Bryson's travel writing will find plenty to love here; his keen eye for detail and delightfully wry wit emerge in the most unlikely places, making At Home an engrossing journey through history, without ever leaving the house. --Lynette MongSimilar Products
Customer Reviews
2010-10-16
By David J. Zussman (Washington DC)
Bill Bryson is a fantastic writer, there is no doubt about it. He is at his best, however, when he tackles academic topics (as in 'At Home' and 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'), as opposed to his more anecdotal writings ('Neither Here Nor There'). Mr. Bryson's real strength lies in his ability to pull the most interesting facts from the most obscure sources, and to string them all together in a not-at-all dull way. This is quite an achievement, given that his subject matter would be horribly boring were it not for his infectious interest in everything he discovers. I doubt any other writer could make me (an adolescent American) remotely interested in 17th century London sewage systems, but Mr. Bryson pulls it off without my being the wiser.
The title is a tad misleading, though Mr. Bryson makes that clear in the opening chapters. While his thoughts do spring from his 19th century rectory, they stray so frequently and completely from the actual home that the book becomes an exploration of England's progress over the past two and a half centuries. A more accurate title might be 'A Brief History of England' or 'Domestic England from 1800-1950'. However, Mr. Bryson's explorations are not unwelcome. Just don't buy this book if you're really looking for insight exclusively into the home.
This book is intelligent, informative, entertaining, and well-researched. Looking at it on my bookshelf makes me lament that more books aren't this clever.
2010-10-15
By K. Carroll (Midwest)
I came to Bryson via A Walk in the Woods and was pleasantly surprised. This book, though, is brilliant. It's as though every time this man opens an encyclopedia or turns a stone, a fascinating story emerges. What might have been dry or tedious subject matter for another writer comes to life in Bryson's capable hands. I've just ordered two more of his books!
2010-10-15
By V. C. Baker (South Africa)
I agree with other reviewers that this book is not what you would expect from the title - but that is hallmark Bill Bryson. His power to surprise and make us laugh out loud with the neatly turned phrase, the essential oddity of the human condition, the humorous quotes (which in many cases the original author didn't intend to be humorous) is what keeps us coming back for more. We are lucky that Mr Bryson can't seem to make up his mind as to where he wants to live or where his loyalties lie - I last met him in rural New England extolling the virtues at the beginning (if not the end) of the book, of his own country. Now we find him buried deep in the English countryside in a house which seems to be cold, draughty, uncomfortable and inconvenient. Yet his powerful scholarship gives us the best (and the worst)of both countries without fear or favour and always, always makes us laugh as we learn.
2010-10-14
By Clauser1960 (Roma, Italy)
I have already laughed a lot, from a continental European perspective, on " A short history of nearly everything (from an Anglo Saxon point of view)" and I am certainly not in the mood of starting another subrealistic trip with the new "A short history of (Anglo Saxon) private life". You might wonder why. It is very easy: the simple fact of starting an "History of private life" from an English Victorian mansion makes the book a ridicolously arrogant joke.
Maybe Mr Bryson should take some decent care of what has happened before the British Empire -boom! boom!-(like the Roman Empire, Middle Age and the Reinassance, just for the Western world), which has NOT - I repeat, NOT at all- been completely transpassed to the British or American way of life.
It would be even better if he could correct the title of his books and insert "Anglo Saxon", just to limit the giant explosions of hilarity that his books provoke here in continental Europe.
One name might wake Mr Bryson up: JULIUS CAESAR who, by the way, used to have a fantastic private life, also during his (non turistic) short but intense and constructive period in the Brutish Islands.
2010-10-13
By Bookreporter.com (New York, New York)
Bill Bryson just can't help it. He writes funny, even when he's being serious, as he is in this latest history of how people have lived over the centuries. This subject could be dry as toast in another author's hands, but with his curious nose buried firmly in historical research while his waggish tongue is planted firmly in cheek, Bryson serves up a rich banquet of utterly fascinating and sometimes horrifying facts of where and how people have slept, eaten, made a living, built homes and monuments, frolicked, traveled, given birth and been laid to rest.
Bryson, who grew up in America's Midwest, has settled with his family into an 1850s vicarage in the Norfolk region of eastern England. The manse, as it would have been called at the time of construction, was typical of parsonages in an age when the local vicar was customarily the son from a wealthy family, chosen by his father to enter the clergy. Most of us, by virtue of Jane Austen and other authors of the day, are aware of the arcane social hierarchy of 19th-century England. These customs are but one of many that Bryson explores to provide a vivid and often humorous history of civilization. AT HOME is much more than a story of British living, however. Bryson uses his historic home as a focal point to examine and describe, under his penetrating and amused eye, how humans of all cultures have adapted, evolved and comported themselves throughout our complicated history.
Bryson's examination of food preparation and ways to determine which are edible and which will kill you is as fascinating as it is hilarious and horrifying. You can imagine how far-reaching those skills have become, leading to discoveries in food preservation, plants that cure disease, discovery of germs, even theories about what caused the witchcraft scare of the 1690s.
Did you know that parks weren't created for leisurely strolls, ball games and picnics? Parks arose from a need to find ways to deal with the overflow of bodies buried, usually several coffins deep, causing hideous, sometimes lethal gases and growing mounds in the church yards and small, designated areas in large cities. Some bright fellow decided that if you buried bodies in large, unused open spaces and planted trees around them, nature would take its course, help the trees and lawns (another result of graveyards) to flourish, and the ghastly situation would be resolved.
As people were attracted to these open vistas of trees and grass and started strolling and picnicking amongst the gravestones, parks were born. This in turn launched a several-decades-long search of the planet for exotic botanical specimens to bring back to adorn the landscape, which included the expedition of the famous Beagle --- the ship that bore Charles Darwin to the South Seas and his famous discovery that changed how we looked at our existence. It also created a career called landscape architecture, which led to... This is how the book goes --- one thing leads to another.
And fashion. We vain, silly humans go to great lengths and physical discomfort to adorn ourselves. One look at the current piercings and tattoos and women staggering about on five-inch stiletto heels shouldn't surprise us that in the 18th and 19th centuries, the attempts to glorify our bodies could prove lethal. Men and women alike painted their faces with lead-based paints, resulting in death and permanent disfigurement. They corseted themselves (men, too) into punctured lungs, broken ribs, congestive heart failure and miscarriages, all for the sake of vanity. It was not uncommon for wigs, which were seldom removed even for sleep, to catch fire and disfigure or even kill the wearer. Voluminous petticoats proved not only ungainly, but a fire hazard if the wearer backed too close to an open grate. A decade of decadence was celebrated by admirers of fashion maven Beau Brummel, who attracted a daily audience that included the Prince of Wales, three dukes, a marquess, two earls and other lucky "dandies" who assembled in his dressing room to watch him bathe, dress and ready himself for a day of...well, looking utterly smashing. There are no records that he did anything else. At least Lady Gaga sings for a living.
Upon reading this delightful and fascinating book, one wonders if experience is such a great teacher as we watch our progress from the cave to our comfy, sanitary surroundings. Bryson muses that perhaps future generations will find us as comical and confusing as we see our forebears.
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