A Short History of Nearly Everything

Why it’s on the list: Bryson’s tour of how the sciences arrived at what they currently believe — cosmology, geology, chemistry, evolution — organised around the people who got there and how often they were nearly wrong. A history of knowledge rather than of events.

Where I heard about it

• Spotted at Bell’s Books, Palo Alto — March 2018 (Books photo album)

• Spotted at SFO — April 2018 (Books photo album)

• A reply to @typesfast — in the thread under his question “What’s the best history book you’ve read?” (June 2025). The full set of replies is on What’s the best history book… (tweet).

Connections

• Bill Bryson — the author.
• Science — the subject, told as a sequence of arguments.
• Open Source Knowledge — the book’s project is making specialist knowledge legible.
• What’s the best history book… (tweet) — the thread this recommendation came from.