A Short History of Nearly Everything was published by Broadway Books in May 2003 and is, by any reasonable measure, the most successful work of popular science writing published in the twenty-first century. Bryson — not a scientist but a writer who decided, at middle age, that he wanted to understand how science had figured out what it knew about the universe — spent three years reading, interviewing scientists, and visiting laboratories, then wrote a book that explained the history and content of major scientific disciplines (cosmology, geology, chemistry, paleontology, physics, biology) to a general audience with such clarity and entertainment value that it sold over three million copies and won the Aventis Prize for Science Books and the Descartes Prize for science communication.
The Book
Bryson structures the book as a journey from the very large to the very small and back again: the Big Bang, the formation of the solar system, the geology of the Earth, the chemistry of life, the biology of cells, the evolution of species, and the rise of Homo sapiens. Each chapter combines an explanation of current scientific understanding with the stories of the scientists who achieved it — and these stories are often as entertaining as the science.
The discovery of the size of the universe involves a cast of obsessive, eccentric, and often mutually hostile astronomers. The measurement of the Earth’s age involves a decades-long battle between geologists and physicists. The discovery of DNA involves a race between rival laboratories that combined genuine brilliance with genuine pettiness. Bryson’s gift is making readers care about both the science and the scientists.
Themes
Science as human endeavor — Bryson consistently presents science not as a body of established facts but as a messy, competitive, often accidental process of discovery conducted by flawed human beings.
Scale — the book’s recurring theme is the difficulty of comprehending scales: the age of the universe, the number of atoms in a cell, the distance between stars. Bryson finds analogies that make the incomprehensible vivid.
Ignorance — Bryson is as interested in what science does NOT know as in what it does. The book repeatedly emphasizes the vast areas of ignorance that surround even our most confident knowledge.
Collecting A Short History of Nearly Everything
First edition (Broadway Books, New York, 2003): Boards with dust jacket. First printing.
Market values (with dust jacket):
- Fine in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Very good: $40–$100
- Signed copies: $200–$600
First UK edition (Doubleday, London, 2003): $75–$200 in dust jacket.
The book’s enormous sales mean that first editions are relatively available, but signed copies and presentation copies command significant premiums. The illustrated edition (2005) and the “Special Illustrated Edition” (2010) are collected as supplements.