Book Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything

I encountered Bill Bryson's work only recently (don't know how I missed him), but this is the third of his books I've read (you can read my reviews of his Shakespeare and The Thunderbolt Kid).

At 500-plus pages and with its compendious title, A Short History of Nearly Everything is the friendly bedside companion I expected it to be. Bryson is incurably curious, a trait all too rare in our entertainment-anesthetized society. What's more, he's obsessively curious about science, which elevates his geekiness to the level of sainthood, in my view. (I'd be willing to bet he has a well-thumbed copy of The Way Things Work, for example.)

As I read his description of nearly everything, I kept hearing the ghost of Carl Sagan muttering "billions and billions" in my ear. If nothing else, Bryson's comparative anecdotes -- if electrons were the size of beach balls (or it is the other way around?) -- will redefine your notions of small (substring size) and large (universe). I recall he had a similar penchant for numeric comparisons when he informed me that Shakespeare's vocabulary contained just 20,000 words and mine 50,000 but the bard personally coined at least 800 of mine.

I learned somewhere else that every breath we take includes about one air molecule that Julius Caesar breathed in his last breath. Bryson informs us that we share billions of molecules with our forebears. Nature recycles. Indeed, the Earth has only so many molecules, and the more complex elements including many we need to live had to be cycled through the furnaces of at least five stars to be manufactured. Just assembling the raw materials for life takes billions upon billions of years.

However, although we may contain a lot of Shakespeare and the detritus he shed over a lifetime, apparently Elvis shit is not yet sufficiently dispersed for all of us to be so full of him.

As Bryson has in the other two books of his I read, he slips into lessons that verge on sermonizing about the future of our race and planet. There is a lot of anger underneath his whimsy. But like him, I really wonder whether we will destroy our habitat or whether the planet will destroy us.

It would not have seemed so likely before the recent announcements from the scientific community that they have apparently been "underestimating" the extent and rate of global warming.

So I recalled a scientific curiousity that Bryson doesn't mention. But I wish he had. I'd like to have his take on it. Sagan was fond of it -- a mathematical formula called the Drake Equation. It's a series of ratios (probabilities) that, when multiplied together, predicts how many intelligent, communicative civilizations are likely to be in our galaxy.

The last factor in the Drake Equation is crucial and yet seemingly impossible for us to know. It's essentially the typical lifespan (actually, the communicative technological span) of an advanced civilization. Drake estimated it at 10,000 years.

If you plug that number into the formula, the result is about two. That is, there could be two potential civilizations in our galaxy with whom we could become Twitter friends, presuming we didn't mind the years-long communication delays as our tweets traverse the light-years between stars.

However, the Wiki article on the Drake Equation points out that the typical lifespan of ancient civilizations on Earth has been only a few hundred years. And the span of time since we've had radio telescopes for signaling has been about 70 years. And our prospects for longevity as a species are not looking all that good.

Civilizations may be as brief as summer roses in their beautiful flowering. (Shakespeare could have said that, but without my rich context.)

If that's true, don't bother to do the math. Our existence might not be the rarest of accidents, but for all practical purposes, there's no one else around at the moment.

That should make us feel very, very special. And very fortunate to have what we have, for however long we have it.

Book Review: Bill Bryson's Shakespeare

Ever since I learned that Gerald and Shakespeare both mean "spear chucker," I've had a long-standing Jones for the Bard. Quite coincidentally, a colleague recently suggested that I'd enjoy anything written by Bill Bryson. My friend suggested A Walk in the Woods or A Short History of Nearly Everything. The first sounded too much like a mossy travelogue and the ambitious scope of the second seemed far too cumbersome for casual sampling. So Bryson's biography, Shakespeare: The World As Stage, was the irresistible choice for me.

I can now agree that Bryson may be the most entertaining nonfiction writer I've ever read. He dares to be a stylist in these days of plain-vanilla journalism, and that is praiseworthy in itself. Perhaps it's in the blood: His father was a sportswriter with the flair of an H. L. Menken or a Heywood Hale Broun.

Apparently Bryson was assigned to write Shakespeare as an entry in the Eminent Lives series from Atlas Books (a HarperCollins imprint, a News Corporation subsidiary, a Viacom competitor, and a prize possession of Rupert Murdoch et al). Right off, Bryson seems bewildered that so much material has been generated about the most illustrious English dramatist -- and most of it on scanty and even nonexistent evidence. You can almost hear Bryson implore, "I got stuck with writing this, now how do I fill a few hundred pages without making stuff up?" He starts by describing the Chandos portrait (shown here), and after tantalizing us with intriguing details about the wealth of the sitter (apparent from the dark clothes, which require lots of expensive dye) to the earring (as rakish on a man then as now), the embarrassed biographer bestows the fact that no one knows whether this most famous likeness is actually the person we've been told it is.

Bryson chatters on, quite amusingly, making much ado about nothing as he overturns reams of research. Perhaps because statistics offer some hope of solid evidence, he informs us that Shakespeare's vocabulary included about 20,000 words. You probably know about 50,000, but today's world is a more complex place. But -- and here's the astounding factoid -- when Shakespeare couldn't find an appropriate word, he apparently made one up.

In fact, Shakespeare contributed about 800 words to your 50K. Among these coinages are: abstemious, antipathy, assassination, barefaced, critical, eventful, excellent, frugal, indistinguishable, leapfrog, lonely, well-read, zany, and, as Bryson quips, countless others, including countless.

Suffice it to say Shakespeare must have had a fairly deep knowledge of Latin and Romance-language root words and syllables, to so effectively concoct and combine new polysyllabic English ones. Is this more grist for the grinders who allege Shakespeare was in fact someone else? Bryson does not comment specifically, but he does a credible job of debunking various Baconian and Marlovian speculations later in the book.

Shakespeare's turns of a phrase also enhanced the language. Many of his inventions are cliches of modern speech (Bryson's compilation): one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father of the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, pomp and circumstance, and foregone conclusion.

The King James Bible was a new translation back then. Most spiritual and scholarly works were still being written in Latin. So the English Bible and Shakespeare's plays apparently contributed more to our daily discourse than you'd think.

I plan to read lots more Bryson, and thanks to him I now admire William Shakespeare (whoever he was) more than ever.