A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. Bryson is best known for his travel books, A Walk in the Woods chief among them. As anyone who has read his books knows, he's both a very good writer, and a supremely un-technical person. By his own admission (in Notes From a Small Island), this is a man who is utterly flummoxed by automobiles.
So when I read that Bill Bryson had written a science book, I knew I had to read it. Pop-science writing is a hard thing to do well, and books frequently fail because they're pitched just over the heads of the intended audience. If ever there was a writer sure to avoid that pitfall, Bill Bryson is the guy. And given his past record, he's unlikely to run afoul of the other great pitfall of science writing, overly dry prose. Even the dullest passages of Bryson's other books positively sparkle next to most bad science writers, so if nothing else, a Bill Bryson science book would have to be lively...
The real question was whether his lack of technical savvy would be too great a handicap to overcome. Happily, it turns out not to be an insuperable obstacle, possibly thanks to the efforts of the "saintly, patient experts" he consulted in the course of his researches. There are a few stumbles-- he has a weird fear of scientific notation which leads him into Saganesque "biiiilllyuns of biiiilllyuns" gibberish from time to time, and there are one or two glaring math errors-- but by and large he does a good job. He manages to fill some of the numerical gaps with colorful analogies, and isn't afraid to lift long chunks of explanation from experts. Some of the physics descriptions are simplified almost to the point of deception, but he basically avoids that trap, and the sections on biology and geology are on firmer footing (that, or I just don't know those fields well enough to catch the mistakes...).
The real strength of the book, as with most of his travel books, lies in Bryson's ability to enliven a story with some bit of colorful historical trivia. The history of science is full of odd an eccentric characters, and he does a marvelous job of bringing them to life through small anecdotes that break up long lectures, but somehow don't impede the flow of information. To choose an example almost at random, there's the story of Swedish chemist Carl Scheele:
Scheele was both an extraordinary and extraordinarily luckless fellow. A poor pharmacist with little in the way of advanced apparatus, he discovered eight elements-- chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen, and oxygen-- and got credit for none of them. In every case, his finds were either overlooked, or made it into publication after someone else had made the same discovery independently. He also discovered many useful compounds, among the ammonia, glycerin, and tannic acid, and was the first to see the commercial potential of chlorine as a bleach-- all breakthroughs that made other people extremely wealthy.
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