A Short History of Nearly Everything

Title: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Author: Bill Bryson
Genre: Non-fiction (science/history)
Pages: 544
Rating (out of 5 stars): **** 1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Bill Bryson sets out to write a science book that is actually readable.  In it, he briefly covers everything from  the Big Bang to evolution to the discovery to gravity (and much, much more).  The focus of the book is not on the what so much as the how.  How did they figure out the distance to the sun?  How do we know what we do about dinosaurs?  And so forth.
Thoughts: I ate this book up.  It's been a long time since I had read much about pure science, and this book filled that gap for more.  Bryson's writing style is extremely readable, with just the right level of detail that it's quite easy to follow along.  He is also very adept and moving from topic to topic in a very natural way.  Interestingly enough, my biggest takeaway from this book is how little we really know about our universe.  For example, only a tiny fraction of all animals that die end up creating fossils, and then we only find a tiny fraction of the fossils that are on the earth.  There are huge pieces that we are just missing.  Given how little we know, the other surprising thing for me was just how difficult it typically is for new discoveries to become widely accepted.  Bryson details multiple times how the established scientific community discredited new evidence for years and years because it didn't match with their conception of the world, only to be proven wrong later.  Anyway, I would highly recommend this book.  It only missed out the extra half star because I felt like it dragged on a bit towards the end.  It needed to be 50 pages shorter, and it would have been perfect.
Disclaimer: None.