At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Clever tour of history through the various rooms of a house.

30% fascinating, 50% interesting, 20% boring. Don't let the title mislead you, this isn't a history of the home. This is a series of tangents about daily life in the 16th-19th century in Britain and America. In parts gruesome. Very well researched and written.

The beginning was interesting, but when he got to 19th century Britain, there were too many tangents. Somewhere in there I realized I wanted to know a more diverse history. Maybe I will pick it back up sometime.

A veces me da la sensacion de que estoy leyendo la Wikipedia y moviendome de pagina a pagina segun me van interesando temas.
Pero me gusta hacer eso de hecho con la Wikipedia asi que para mi es perfecto.
Algunos temas los conocia como la influencia del te o el tema de las especias. Otros han sido totalmente sorpresa como todo lo relacionado con paisajes o casa absurdas.

Es entretenido, cambiando de tema constantemente, un nuevo enlace en la Wikipedia..

Wonderful, fascinating read. I don't think there is anyone who wouldn't enjoy this book.

A fun book filled with interesting pieces of history. Not rigorous by any means, but if you like Bryson's way of providing bits of history tied together by a somewhat-arbitrary common narrative, you'll like this.

I learned so much from this book and it was fascinating imagine how all the convinces of my home came to be. So parts were a little dry, but overall I'm glad I came across this book.

I got the feeling that the author had as much fun writing this book as I did reading it. There is a quote from The Mail On Sunday on the front of my copy which reads “Endlessly fascinating”, which is only half true because sadly the book does eventually come to an end.

Bill Bryson can somehow take the most mundane sounding of themes and turn it into an adventure spanning the globe with seemingly little effort. At Home: A Short History of Private Life takes readers on a magnificent journey spanning our entire existence and every facet of our lives and introduces us to people, places and events that have shaped our everyday lives whether we know it or not. Bill Bryson's great skill is in presenting facts and history that serve as a launching pad for you to think more closely about everything you encounter and to be curious about the smallest of things. Something like that cannot be praised highly enough.

It's one of those books that once you start reading it you will struggle to put it down. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you're at all familiar with Bill Bryson's other books then this is a must have. If you're at all interested in interesting and strange facts then you'll fall in love instantly with this book. In fact as soon as you're done reading this review I've written go out and buy this book as soon as possible!

This book took me forever to get through, even so in was an intriguing read, I would recommend to anyone with an Interest in the history of humanity in the last few centuries.

Bill Bryson can't write a bad sentence. This is another typical Bryson book - chock full of fascinating information, people and history. Highly recommended.

I was more than a little disappointed by how Anglo-American centric the history of the home apparently is, but it's still a Bill Bryson book.

Bill Bryson, a favorite author of mine, looks around his house and wonders where everything came from. The house in question is rectory dating from 1851 in some out-of-the-way spot in England. From the hall, to the kitchen, to the drawing room, bedroom, attic, and more, Bryson expounds on the history behind many different things that we now take for granted. It's wonderfully informative and fascinating stuff. How often can you say you breezed through a 700-page non-fiction book? Well, I did just now. There is a wealth of fascinating – sometimes amazing – facts within. For instance:

> Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plant thought to exist on earth, just eleven – corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, casava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats – account for account for 93 per cent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.

> Your bed, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned... is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye. It's been calculated that if your pillow is six years old, one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung.

> The cleanest surface in the average house is the toilet seat; the fithiest object is the kitchen wash cloth.

> Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generation every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American.

Most of the chapters in the book are named after rooms in the house. In some cases, Bryson barely touches on the significance of the room but instead launches into some compelling story from history about private life. The book is full of curious characters from history, some well-known and others largely forgotten. Many of these passages are taken from the Victorian era and one quickly counts oneself lucky not to have lived in that time. This book was highly enjoyable.

In this book Bryson explores the history and culture of Victorian England (and the U.S.) by talking about each room of his Norfolk home, built in that era. There are many tangents into architecture, the Industrial Revolution, agriculture, and historical figures, all stories told with Bryson's flair for honing in on the most fascinating human details. My only criticism is that, in an effort to tell the most compelling story, he perhaps omits details and in some cases contradicts himself. The fact that it took me 18 months to finish this book is because, if anything, it's too interesting, and I wanted to take my time savouring the details.

Brain candy, pure and simple. Very entertaining and informative over an astonishing array of subjects that come into the author's head as he wanders through his old house. Sex, death, archeology, plumbing, you name it, it's all here.

A grand-scale, rambling tour. At times it's hard to see where he's going, but every detail counts ... and is often revisited. Bryson's writing style is as always intimate and delightful.

(From my blog Near Earth Object)

About halfway through Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life, one can't help but come to a couple of stark conclusions. One, that most of humanity's domestic life, for the vast majority of time time we had domestic lives, was full of suffering and misery the likes of which we moderns can barely imagine. Two, that the tiny percentage of the species blessed with an overabundance of money and/or status have not been content to simply live well, but have wasted vast economic resources to spoil and aggrandize themselves in ways that would make Ozymandias cringe.

Bryson is a wonderful writer, and his storytelling is as usual conversational while remaining high-minded, as he clearly glories in his research and discoveries while allowing the space for the reader to catch up to him.

But his subject, I suppose, necessitated the retelling of these two central themes I've mentioned: The misery of the underclasses (disease, vermin, cold, being overwhelmed by feces, etc.) and the unabated vanity of the rich (who also, it should be noticed, were subject to disease and other unpleasantness, but often in Bryson's telling faced ruin by their own ignorance or hubris). But if it is necessary, it is also relentless. Story after story, anecdote after anecdote is a tail that either makes one feel deep pity for those who are crushed under the weight of their poverty or nausea over the largess of the aristocracy. In between are the triumphs, the brilliant ideas, the advances, but it becomes almost exhausting when one contemplates the mayhem from which the victories emerge.

Here's a good summation from the book, a quote from Edmond Halley (of comet fame), that I feel gets to the heart of the long crawl of human domesticity — human daily life — over the centuries.

How unjustly we repine at the shortness of our Lives and think our selves wronged if we attain not Old Age; where it appears hereby, that the one half of those that are born are dead in Seventeen years.... [So] instead of murmuring at what we call an untimely Death, we ought with Patience and unconcern to submit to that Dissolution which is the necessary Condition of our perishable Materials.

LOVED this one! If you are a history buff and love little tidbits of information, then you will LOVE this book! The author takes you through each room of his 1800's built home (that was once a rectory)and shares fascinating bits of history and stories. Excellent read!