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At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson
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With his signature wit, charm, and seemingly limitless knowledge, Bill Bryson takes us on a room-by-room tour through his own house, using each room as a jumping off point into the vast history of the domestic artifacts we take for granted. As he takes us through the history of our modern comforts, Bryson demonstrates that whatever happens in the world eventually ends up in our home, in the paint, the pipes, the pillows, and every item of furniture. Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and his sheer prose fluency makes At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life.
- Sales Rank: #7824 in Books
- Published on: 2011-10-04
- Released on: 2011-10-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.96" h x 1.21" w x 5.17" l, 1.22 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 581 pages
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2010: Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) turns his attention from science to society in his authoritative history of domesticity, At Home: A Short History of Private Life. While walking through his own home, a former Church of England rectory built in the 19th century, Bryson reconstructs the fascinating history of the household, room by room. With waggish humor and a knack for unearthing the extraordinary stories behind the seemingly commonplace, he examines how everyday items--things like ice, cookbooks, glass windows, and salt and pepper--transformed the way people lived, and how houses evolved around these new commodities. "Houses are really quite odd things," Bryson writes, and, luckily for us, he is a writer who thrives on oddities. He gracefully draws connections between an eclectic array of events that have affected home life, covering everything from the relationship between cholera outbreaks and modern landscaping, to toxic makeup, highly flammable hoopskirts, and other unexpected hazards of fashion. Fans of Bryson's travel writing will find plenty to love here; his keen eye for detail and delightfully wry wit emerge in the most unlikely places, making At Home an engrossing journey through history, without ever leaving the house. --Lynette Mong
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Bryson (A Short History of Everything) takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, and finds it crammed with 10,000 years of fascinating historical bric-a-brac. Each room becomes a starting point for a free-ranging discussion of rarely noticed but foundational aspects of social life. A visit to the kitchen prompts disquisitions on food adulteration and gluttony; a peek into the bedroom reveals nutty sex nostrums and the horrors of premodern surgery; in the study we find rats and locusts; a stop in the scullery illuminates the put-upon lives of servants. Bryson follows his inquisitiveness wherever it goes, from Darwinian evolution to the invention of the lawnmower, while savoring eccentric characters and untoward events (like Queen Elizabeth I's pilfering of a subject's silverware). There are many guilty pleasures, from Bryson's droll prose--"What really turned the Victorians to bathing, however, was the realization that it could be gloriously punishing"--to the many tantalizing glimpses behind closed doors at aristocratic English country houses. In demonstrating how everything we take for granted, from comfortable furniture to smoke-free air, went from unimaginable luxury to humdrum routine, Bryson shows us how odd and improbable our own lives really are.
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From Booklist
Bryson, author of A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) and A Walk in the Woods (2009), lives in a Victorian parsonage built in 1851. He uses the old house with its long history and mundane domestic items to explore the evolution of the home. His detailed tour is a seamless meandering from room to room, subject to subject, with fascinating digressions. He touches on how the hall evolved from a grand room, the most important in the house, to just a place to “wipe feet and hang hats”; how rooms developed based on changing notions of utility and privacy; how the development of the fireplace led to the development of the second floor. He offers historical and cultural origins of the names of rooms and common household items: table, chair, cookware, bedchamber, closet, study. He details how the development of different materials—bricks to make chimneys and coal for fuel—changed housing construction. The chapter on the kitchen prompts a discourse on food contamination, ice and mason jars, cookbooks and measuring utensils. A beautifully written ode to the ordinary and overlooked things of everyday life in the home. --Vanessa Bush
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
We enjoyed it very much
By Busy Mom
Bill Bryson never disappoints and this book is no exception. I read it several years ago, recommending it to everyone I knew. Such fascinating material for him to work with and he works with all material so well. When I saw it was available in an audio book I decided to buy it for an upcoming drive from Florida to New England. We enjoyed it very much. Nothing personal to the author but I know he's an American so I did find his British "ness" terminology a bit annoying. Having lived overseas for many years and knowing many people taught in British English, I full well know how easy it is to pick up their interesting terminology, still I found it somewhat difficult to put up with coming from a mostly American accent. . Overall though I enjoyed the audio version and I recommend it and the book itself highly.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Home Is Where The History Is
By Franklin the Mouse
My expectations were that Mr. Bryson's book would cover different household items and traditions, but I was clearly mistaken. Each room that he investigates in his home is more a launching pad to cover topics that only remotely apply to the rooms. Darwin's theory of evolution, penile pricking rings, Otzi the Iceman, and rodents' qualities are but a few examples of odd tangents. Mercy, the man is all over the place in this thing but no matter. The information was still interesting. There are nineteen chapters covering from the building of his home in 1851 to the kitchen, the study, the dining room, the stairs, the cellar, the garden, the bedroom, the garden, and so on and so on until the author finishes up in the attic.
Mr. Bryson's playful curiosity about the world around him is infectious. Some topics, such as the bathroom and the difficulties of waste management prior to water treatment facilities made me queasy. I'll never complain about cleaning our toilets ever again. That's for sure. Ultimately, the book is chock full of many home qualities that we never or rarely wonder how they came into being. He also focuses a great deal of time on the oodles of lunatic Victorian mores that make me darned happy to be living in our more enlightened age. Heck, the whole book makes me happy that we have electricity, indoor plumbing, advanced medicine, mattresses, bathing and less draconian social services for the destitute.
'At Home' is not as entertaining as Mr. Bryson's 'A Walk in the Woods' but more informative. It is light reading, full of fun facts and an occasional dry sarcastic remark which always made me chuckle. If you're interested in something other than a murder mystery, science fiction, romance or whatnot then the author's easy-to-read book is a nice way to kill a few hours.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Great contextual overview
By Cotter D, Christian
This very well written book takes the reader on a journey through history using the metaphor of home and domesticity. While the topics and figures encountered range in time, scale, and scope, taken together they paint a comprehensive picture of the amazing changes that occurred during the 19th century. As a reader, I was reminded of things I'd learned before and inspired to research more about new ones.
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