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Tag Archives: Bill Bryson

Book review: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

words and images Posted on November 13, 2011 by dlschirfNovember 12, 2022

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson. Recommended.

Bill Bryson is known for his wry humour, and this is my first experience of it. Bryson gets it into his head to walk the famous Appalachian Trail. He is joined in this venture by Stephen Katz, an alcoholic, troubled, overweight friend who’s an unlikely candidate as a hiker/mountain man but who, with his many foibles, adds a much-needed personal touch.

Bryson covers a lot of territory — literally and figuratively. He talks briefly about the birth and history of the trail, hazards that range from bears and lethal viruses to unforgiving weather and deranged murderers, the decline of forest species, acid rain, the maps developed of the trail, its disputed length, the shelters along the way, the Forest Service’s love affair with road building, the National Park Service’s love affair with inefficiency and mismanagement, the people they meet on the trail and off the trail in small towns and tourist trap cities, pack weight, food, and how what you do is walk. We also learn a great deal about Katz that make him both likeable and not at all likeable. I suspect he is someone who is interesting and funny to read about, but who is infuriating in real life. His nonchalance when Bryson is convinced there are bears nearby is a high point.

Bryson is charming, witty, aggravating, and snobbish. If you can see the humorous side of bureaucracy, small-town and rural America, and what was once known as Yuppiedom, you will appreciate his running commentary on The downside of the book is that it hits an anticlimax shy of 2/3 through and never recovers. Perhaps this is symbolic of how walking the trail is.

This is not an Appalachian Trail “how-to” book, nor is it for the serious hiker or nature lover who expects to find out vicariously what it’s like to hike the trail. It’s a dryly funny commentary on humanity that happens to be a walk in the woods.

16 March 2002
Copyright © Diane Schirf

Posted in Blog, Book Reviews, Books and literature | Tagged Bill Bryson, nature, nonfiction | Leave a reply

Book review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

words and images Posted on May 17, 2009 by dlschirfMarch 9, 2023

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. New York: Broadway Books. 2003. 560 pages.

To me, the sciences are fascinating but elusive. The concepts are marvelous and compelling, but the details are difficult and tedious, especially if your grasp of mathematics is as tenuous as mine. I grew up with a love for what I knew of astronomy and the underlying physics, and an interest in such things as geology, paleontology, and meteorology. These subjects are taught badly, if taught at all, and I never understood them well enough for my curiosity to deepen into understanding.

That’s where The Short History of Nearly Everything comes in. Bill Bryson explains much of what we know and how we came to know it through an abundance of examples and similes, not through formulas and theories. Not surprisingly, he’s at his weakest in the most difficult areas. He tries to explain particle physics but is forced to fall back, fairly enough, on, “The fact is, there is a great deal, even at quite a fundamental level, that we don’t know . . . The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.” When it comes to string theory, he throws up his hands helplessly, which is understandable since most physicists seem to find it nearly impossible to articulate. Bryson is on firmer ground with Einstein’s theories, which make more sense to me now — gravity is not a force, per se, but “a product of the bending of spacetime . . . no longer so much a thing as an outcome.” Even here, though, he admits, “Our brains can take us only so far because it is nearly impossible to envision a dimension comprising three parts space to one part time, all interwoven like the threads in a plaid fabric.”

Where Bryson shines brightest is on terra firma, geology and the earth as well as ocean sciences. As Bryson shows in numerous cases, once upon a time, science wasn’t just for scientists. Charles Smithson of The French Lieutenant’s Woman was not just a figment of author John Fowles’ imagination, but representative of a Victorian spirit of scientific interest and discovery. Even Einstein, at the time he published his special theory of relativity, had attended only a four-year course “designed to churn out high school science teachers” and was working in the Swiss patent office — not exactly the type of credentials associated with today’s Nobel Prize winners. The 1800s were an especially fruitful time for dedicated amateurs represented in literature by characters such as Smithson and Roger Hamley of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. There was Roderick Murchison, who “became with rather astonishing swiftness a titan of geological thinking,” or fossil collector and seller Mary Anning, who was the first to discover a plesiosaurus (not, as Bryson puts it, to “find the first plesiosaurus”) and who “could extract [fossils] with the greatest delicacy and without damage.” Lest we think the entrepreneurial spirit of science dead, however, Bryson introduces Reverend Robert Evans, who, from his home in Australia, had as of early 2003 discovered 36 supernovae. To help the reader comprehend the magnitude of this feat, Bryson provides ample context.

Science is often focused on the numbers, but it’s difficult for the human mind to grasp the very large and the very small that are well outside our physical perception. If my teachers had used comparisons and analogies like Bryson’s and his sources, I and my classmates might have understood the significance of all those swirling numbers and formulae. For example, most of us have seen the typical solar system chart neatly tucked into a textbook or displayed on a poster. But the planets don’t come one after the other at “neighborly intervals.” If Earth were the diameter of a pea, “Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway”). Bryson adds that the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be nearly 10,000 miles away at this scale. It’s easier to appreciate the size and wonder of the universe when presented in a tangible way rather than as a bunch of 10s with superscripts.

Bryson covers a lot of territory — astronomy, earth science, oceanography, physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, origins of man, and even the microbes that keep us healthy and make us miserable. Earth and its life depend on delicately balanced systems and processes, with the potential for natural or man-made disaster ever present. The chapter on the Yellowstone supervolcano (“Dangerous Beauty”) would keep any nervous soul up a few nights, while humbling chapters like “Lonely Planet” reveal how much of what we rely on is beyond our control — the molten nature of Earth’s interior, our moon that is just the right size and orbit to keep our planet stabilized, the position of the Earth relative to the sun (five percent closer or 15 percent farther, and we would cease to exist as we know ourselves). Bryson reminds us that we are a hair’s breadth from unpredictable and/or unpreventable disaster, whether from space or from within our own home.

As we live day to day, going to work, shopping, eating, sleeping, spending time with friends, even vacationing with the family at Yellowstone, it’s easy to forget that we’re part of more than a neighborhood, a city, or even a country. We’re also part of the complex systems that sustain us, our planet Earth, and the universe around us. If you have, A Short HIstory of Nearly Everything may help you to recall the wonder and the fragility of it all.

17 May 2009
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Posted in Blog, Book Reviews, Books and literature | Tagged Bill Bryson, nonfiction, science | Leave a reply

In all, not the best place for the comma

words and images Posted on February 27, 2009 by dlschirfFebruary 17, 2023

At 2:15 a.m., I couldn’t understand this sentence from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson:

In all, the internal turmoil particles within the cloud pick up electrical charges.

After a few moments I mentally moved the comma:

In all the internal turmoil, particles within the cloud pick up electrical charges.

Only Bryson and his editor know whose choice it was to (unintentionally) misplace the comma, given the sentence’s meaning. It makes it read like a bad foreign language translation.

And so to bed. Again.

Posted in Blog, Books and literature, Language | Tagged Bill Bryson, grammar | Leave a reply

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