It would be only partly a function of age, then, that may make one feel a keen sense of disappointment with The Body. Bryson's Shakespeare: The World as Stage had just been released and it was a hard call but I found Bryson's idiosyncratic, even erratic detours through Elizabethan England and controversies about Shakespeare more charming, more page-turning, than A Short History.
The aforementioned argument with my friend, however, was about something different: I contended that as wonderful as A Short History was, where Bryson really shined was in his less sweeping books. It's not controversial to observe that the hallowed world of academia tends to look down upon such works (the implicit argument is that something so ambitious is necessarily a work of synthesis, not research) - but it's fascinating to note that for many, like myself, who ended up in academia, a work like A Short History may just have been a pivotal push in the right direction. Regardless, both authors had similar impulses: to communicate science, medicine, history, geography, what-have-you, simply, for anyone to read. Far more than Bryson, Stokes Brown is now seen as somebody with an important approach to history: that human history cannot be fully understood without taking a much longer view of history in general, human and otherwise. It was called Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present. Bryson's celebrated book was the sort of thing academic historians today have a phrase for: "big history." Just four years after A Short History was published, the historian Cynthia Stokes Brown released a book with a similar scope. Of course we loved A Short History - as did everybody else, it seems. It's easy to imagine precocious teenagers reading Bryson's new book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, in much the same spirit. When I was a teenager, I had an argument with a close friend about Bill Bryson.īoth of us were competitive debaters, which meant we actively sought out sweeping, magisterial works like A Short History of Nearly Everything - something from which we could glean as much as possible from as little as possible. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Body Subtitle A Guide for Occupants Author Bill Bryson
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