6/2/2023 0 Comments At Home by Bill BrysonIn his own house, a former parsonage in a tiny village in England, Bryson is perplexed by the. His wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life. Bill Bryson could make paint drying seem utterly fascinating. 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.īill 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. 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. Upon returning to the United States after 20 years abroad, Bryson realized that his new home in New Hampshire stood a mere stone’s throw from the famed Appalachian Trail, which spans 2,200 miles along the eastern seaboard from Georgia to Maine. 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. They are where history ends up.īill 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.
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