Library Director’s NotebookFebruary, 2013 At Home by Bill Bryson is a book with a rather dull title;...

Tue, 01/29/2013 - 12:01pm -- KChin

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Library Director’s Notebook
February, 2013

At Home by Bill Bryson is a book with a rather dull title; but that is the only thing that is dull about it.  In fact, I have rarely read a book so full of interesting information, including wide ranging topics  running the gauntlet between science, literature, politics, art, discovery, child raising, personal hygiene, and the love affairs of the rich, famous, or the infamous, to name only a few.

Bill Bryson has developed his own inimitable style via his very popular books including A Walk in the Woods and Notes from a Small Island.  That style is a wonderful melding of popular science, solid research, and a quirky, at times startling sense of humor that leavens even his most detailed or complex  descriptions.

At Home starts with Bryson’s appreciation of his new home, a former Church of England Rectory in Norfolk, England. Quite by accident he discovers a hidden doorway that leads him to a tiny viewing space with a panoramic view of the surrounding pastoral countryside.  This stirs his writer’s imagination and begins his quest for information about houses, dwellings, and habitations of every kind.  With his curiosity thoroughly aroused, Bryson begins to systematically examine a typical home, using his current home as a launching place, taking each living space, one at a time, to discover its earliest beginnings.

What we get as a result of Bryson’s tireless research is a lengthy, minutely detailed and delightfully entertaining social history of the creation and evolution of homes.  For example, where did the concept of the kitchen, or the dining room, or the bathroom spring from, back in the forgotten centuries of human development?  In fact, when did the whole concept of “home”, the personal property and pride of individual families, take hold?

Step by step, or rather, room by room, we travel with Bill Bryson back through time to meet the inventors and the visionaries, the noble and the humble, the creators and the crooks, responsible for all the comforts, conveniences, and quirks we now find in our modern homes. For example, we learn about the beginnings of bathtubs and bathing, glass and windows, toilets and sewers and the genesis of just about every square inch of a typical house that has ever been conceived or created.

This is an admirable book, overflowing with information, but it is also an amusing, laugh-out- loud, compulsively readable book. Whether your interests are in history, science, humanities,  social and political history, architecture, archeology, or the arts, this book will become an instant favorite, something to read through with pleasure again and again—in any room of the house you choose!

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