Richard's Book Club #11
-"A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson (sometime in early November thru November 30th)
http://www.amazon.com/Short-History-Nearly-Everything/dp/076790818X/sr=8-1/qid=1164936977/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-6589595-9232162?ie=UTF8&s=books
My two-and-a-half cents:
I want to begin this by saying that I love the world. I especially love life. Specifically, I love being alive.
I hope you do too.
This book is about... well... pretty much everything. Quite ambitious if you ask me. It naturally starts with the Big Bang and what physics say about it, then some chemistry and geology thrown in, with the middle of the book being about how damn unsafe this planet is. I want to congratulate Bryson on explaining what the fuck Einstein was talking about with his whole general relativity thing. I dunno if you know this, but the guy was a fuckin' genius. And Sir Issac Newton? The guy was the biggest prick known to man. He basically made calculus and then sat on it for a few decades for no apparent reason. Talk about a douche!
This is when the book gets somewhat flat. It's at this point that he starts to explain the atmosphere and fossils and ancient periods of time. I dunno about you, but I find that stuff about as stimulating as flies fucking. Whereas Bryson made chemistry and physics sound like pretty bitchin' stuff, the rest of it (anthropology in particular) made me want to throw up my liver. I mean... I know it has purpose in a book that is scientifically driven about the history of everything, but Jesus Christ... I've had better times waiting in line at the DMV than reading this book in certain sections.
Overall, it did open my eyes to quite a few things. They are too numerous to mention in specific, but I do want to mention that, if you're like me when it comes to science, this book will prove you know next to nothing. And then you realize that the scientists themselves know few things. Honestly, the best part about this book is the stories behind the discoveries; something that really makes you more interested in the subject. Teachers should implement this notion when teaching.
Killer Quote: (Bryson talking about the irony in Newton's "Principia" being published the same time as the dodo bird's extinction due to humans)
"You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being - a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn't even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it."
Next: "Dracula" by Brom Stoker