A Short History of Nearly Everything: 2.0 - Paperback

by Bill Bryson (Author)

THE #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER, UPDATED FOR 2025 - A wonder-filled quest to understand everything that has happened in the history of the Earth, from the Big Bang theory to the rise of civilization and beyond--revised to reflect the last two decades of scientific advancement

"Brims with strange and amazing facts . . . destined to become a modern classic of science writing."--The New York Times

How did we get from being nothing at all to where we are today? How did the age of the dinosaurs eventually give way to the age of the iPhone? In this completely revised update to the international phenomenon A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson returns to answer these questions and many more.

Bryson brings a groundbreaking account of life itself to a new generation of readers, as he takes subjects often passed off as boring and incomprehensible and renders them accessible, fascinating, and outright amusing to anyone who's ever wondered about the world around them. Introducing readers to a diverse cast of the world's most impressive archaeologists, paleontologists, physicists, astronomers, anthropologists, and mathematicians--from their offices and laboratories to dig sites and field camps--Bryson embarks on a journey to discover answers to the biggest questions about the universe and ourselves.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is a profoundly enlightening, surprisingly humorous, and charmingly clever adventure into the realm of human knowledge, as only Bryson can render it. His revamped Short History is a thrilling journey through time and space, and his writing will make readers both new and old see the world in a whole new way.

Front Jacket

Bill Bryson is one of the world's most beloved and bestselling writers. In "A Short History of Nearly Everything, he takes his ultimate journey-into the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer. It's a dazzling quest, the intellectual odyssey of a lifetime, as this insatiably curious writer attempts to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. Or, as the author puts it, ..."how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since." This is, in short, a tall order.
To that end, Bill Bryson apprenticed himself to a host of the world's most profound scientific minds, living and dead. His challenge is to take subjects like geology, chemisty, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people, like himself, made bored (or scared) stiff of science by school. His interest is not simply to discover "what we know but to find out "how we know it. How do we know what is in the center of the earth, thousands of miles beneath the surface? How can we know the extent and the composition of the universe, or what a black hole is? How can we know where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out?
On his travels through space and time, Bill Bryson encounters a splendid gallery of the most fascinating, eccentric, competitive, and foolish personalities ever to ask a hard question. In their company, he undertakes a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventurein the realms of human knowledge, as only this superb writer can render it. Science has never been more involving, and the world we inhabit has never been fuller of wonder and delight.

Author Biography

Bill Bryson's bestselling books include The Road to Little Dribbling, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, One Summer, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words, and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. His acclaimed work of popular science A Short History of Nearly Everything won the Aventis Prize and the Descartes Prize and is the bestselling nonfiction book of the twenty-first century. Bill Bryson was a chancellor of Durham University, is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society, and lives in England.