num_pages: 497
description: Houses arent refuges from history. They are where history ends up.Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to write a history of the world without leaving home. The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom sex death and sleep; the kitchen nutrition and the spice trade; and so on as Bryson shows how each has figured in the evolution of private life. Whatever happens in the world he demonstrates ends up in our house in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.(front flap)
language: English
title: At Home: A Short History of Private Life
publisher: Doubleday