Book 16: At Home by Bill Bryson

I'd never read any Bill Bryson before (although he seems to have written approximately 4000 books), so I wasn't precisely sure what to expect from At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Well, I mean, I guess the subtitle gave me something of a hint. Reading Bill Bryson is kind of like listening to a charming but eccentric professor who is delightfully easy to lead off track onto some fascinating tangent that lasts for the whole class period. I kept finding myself wondering--and utterly unable to remember--how, for example, the chapter on the bedroom wound up talking about the history of cremation. Bryson won me over in the introduction, when he started wondering why we have salt and pepper shakers on our kitchen tables instead of, say, cinnamon and basil shakers. Yes, why indeed? I couldn't wait to find out. As far as I can recall, though, Bryson never manages to actually explain why...at least not about pepper (salt seems fairly self explanatory anyway. duh--it's salt. yum). But no matter; At Home is a fascinating compendium of knowledge--some useful, some decidedly not. Laura Miller, in her review for Salon, writes that, " 'At Home' may ultimately be a bit pointless, but damn if it isn't a lot of fun all the same." I think that pretty well sums it up. Bryson does have a thesis, of sorts; it's directly stated in fact, and placed curiously a full third of the way through the book: "If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly." And I guess in some way or another, most all of the topics Bryson touches on do lead back to this central idea. Smallpox, crop rotation, the staircases in Monticello, locusts, frozen cavemen, the invention of the telephone, wig fashions, the commercial history of ice....yep; they're all covered here.