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 found 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 the history of hygiene, the bedroom for an account of sex, death, and sleep, the kitchen for a discussion of nutrition and the spice trade, and so on, showing how each has figured in the evolution of private life. From architecture to electricity, from food preservation to epidemics, from the telephone to the Eiffel Tower, from crinolines to toilets - and the brilliant, creative, and often eccentric talents behind them - Bryson demonstrates that whatever happens in the world ends up in our houses, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.
This is a no-brainer. Either you like Bill Bryson, and you like At Home, or you hate Bill Bryson, and you hate At Home. Or you feel tepid about both, whatever. All your myriad complicated feelings about Bryson's other work will hold equally true here, there is no great departure of style or character from his usual. Lucky for me, I happen to like his style and character.
Bryson takes on a bit more to chew this time around - more or less European and American history from maybe the 17th to the 19th century, with a bit of older events tossed in. It's an interesting read, for sure. Bryson covers just about every topic at least once (there's a handy index in the back which runs from actuarial tables to Yellow Fever - although come to think of it, those two topics may have something in common) skipping around in each chapter to discuss things not dreamed of when presented with the heading "The Study". For example: bats. Or using the Nursery as an opportunity to talk about workhouses.
For all it's compelling and fascinating, Bryson does like to go off on tangents, and often will mention a person in passing, only to reintroduce them fifty pages later, on a side tangent for a completely different topic. It can get a little frustrating at times, the sheer amount of information which Bryson pours out makes it well nigh impossible to retain individual names and events, especially when one (me) reads the books in chaptered segments instead of in one glorious swoop. Because the information is ordered -loosely- by room, instead of chronologically, it can get hard to figure out just what happened when. Did people have telephones and lawnmowers at the same time, or were they mowing and creating landscapes before they could call their neighbors to tell them about it? Was Coade stone popular when Thomas Jefferson began his never-ending quest to build Monticello, and did he use it in his plans? Did Darwin leave with gas lights and come back to kerosene, or vice versa or was it completely different? It's all in there, but it's so mixed up in stoves and wells and Phylloxera and smog and iron and locusts and the tendency of the British peerage to marry American heiresses that I did not, let's be honest, retain much of anything at all.
But for all it's faults, it's still a very entertaining read, and no matter how long the index is, or how many important-sounding names it contains, I would call At Home light reading. Bryson is a master at the art of the anecdote, the light quip. Every page has a bit to smile at:
While showing off his [$519,750 bottle of Chateau Margaux wine] at a New York restaurant in 1989, William Sokolin, a wine merchant, accidentally knocked the bottle against the side of a serving cart and it broke, in an instant converting the world's most expensive bottle of wine into the world's most expensive carpet stain. The restaurant manager dipped a finger in the wine and declared that it was no longer drinkable anyway. [The Garden - p.279]
At one point, a single manufacturer offered no fewer than 146 types of flatware for the table. Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. Though it remains the standard instrument for dealing with fish of all kinds, no one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it. There isn't a single kind of fish that that it cuts better or bones more delicately than a conventional knife does. [The Dining Room - p.187]
During [Benjamin Franklin's] years in London, he developed the custom of taking "air baths," basking naked in front of an open upstairs window. This can't have got him any cleaner, but it seems to have done him no harm and it must at least have given the neighbors something to talk about. [The Bathroom - p.350]
Oliver Goldsmith lamented the practice [of razing villages for a better view] in a long, sentimental poem, "The Deserted Village," inspired by a visit to Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire when the first Earl Harcourt was in the process of erasing an ancient village to create a more picturesque space for his new house. Here at least fate exacted an interesting revenge. After completing the work, the earl went for a stroll around his newly reconfigured grounds, but failed to recall where the old village well had been, fell into it, and drowned. [The Garden - p.259]
It's all very amusing - I just wish I could remember it better.
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