A Short History of Nearly Everything: Special Illustrated Edition
From primordial nothingness to this very moment,A Short History of  Nearly Everythingreports what happened and how humans figured it  out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses  hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with  luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who  rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how  we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the  unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style  and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. ThoughA Short Historyclocks  in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every  science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed  novel (albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a  topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters  are grouped into larger sections such as "The Size of the Earth" and  "Life Itself." Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author ofLifeandTrilobite)  and these interviews are charming. But it's when Bryson dives into some  of science's best and most embarrassing fights--Cope vs. Marsh,Conway  Morrisvs.Gould--that  he finds literary gold.--Therese Littleton--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.