Wednesday, December 1, 2010

at home with bill bryson.

Bill Bryson has created a book unlike anything I have ever read in At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Some of you might think that a book about a person's home is simply boring, I agree. Somehow Bryson turned this book about every day things, into a bestseller. It's really incredible. 

Bryson was a little ahead of the game in the sense that his house happens to be a Victorian parsonage in England. Makes things a bit more interesting right from the get go. What he is trying to show us is that all history ends up in the home. We study history in school and for personal reasons, yet we do not study where this history comes from, the people who lived it and how they did so. Bryson wanders around his house incorporating historical facts. You see his humor as well as his ability to create something like a bathroom and turn it into a remarkable history lesson.

Believe it or not, it's actually quite entertaining. 

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