If you've been out of high school a long time, like more than 10 years, most of what Bill Bryson writes about in his magnum opus science survey will come as a revelation to you. It did to me, even though I had the benefit of some really great science teachers. I just have forgotten most of the details and a few days after finishing his book, I've forgotten them all over again, but that's besides the point. The point is that Bryson can hold your attention like no secondary school science teacher you've ever met.

Bryson explains in detail everything from the Big Bang to the rise of Homo Sapiens with chapters that flow seamlessly from one to another. But the book doesn't just regurgitate mindnumbing facts. There are plenty of facts to be sure, but the meat of the book is made up of anecdote, such as Linnaeus' bizarre preoccupation with sex, accident, like the German scientist Hennig Brand who in 1675 thought he could distill gold from human urine and in the process managed to discover phosporous, and simile, such as the number of protons in the dot of this i is equal to the number of seconds in half a million years, to render comprehensible material that would have most of us face down on a desk in a puddle of drool. And not just comprehensible, interesting and funny too.

Something I really liked about the way Bryson handled the material is that for each discipline, physics, chemistry, paleontology or astronomy, geology, microbiology and everything in between, he writes not just how the world works, but how we came to understand how the world works. He tells about scientists who died in obscurity, like Clair Patterson, maybe the most influentional geologist in the 20th century who the first person to accurately give an age to the Earth (4,550 millon years) and brought to everyone's attention the dangerous of lead poisoning. We read about infighting the arguments and discussions that took place. About how few scientists believed, for example, in Plate Tectonics when it was first proposed. The idea was dismissed out of hand by a noted geologist named Charles Hapgood in a book entitled Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science (AKA "A New Cure For Insomnia: Read This Book") which featured a glowing forward by none other than Albert Einstein. Depite Hapgood's skepticism, Plate Tectonics is now universally accepted. And so it goes whether you're talking about planetary motion, the existence of electrons or evolution.

Short History is quite a revelation. Everyone should have this book on their shelf.