At Home
At Home: A Short History of Private Life is a history of domestic life written by Bill Bryson. It was published in May 2010. The book covers topics of the commerce, architecture, technology and geography that have shaped homes into what they are today, told through a series of "tours" through Bryson's Norfolk rectory that quickly digress into the history of each particular room.
Stats for nerds
12recommend
27mentions
22people
2010–2026years
56% recommend44% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- This type of trivia is why I found Bill Bryson’s “At Home” so entertaining. Tariff on windows? People cover them with bricks. Tariff on glass? Windows made of other materials. Tariff on… well, maybe stop designing tariffs if you can’t predict the outcome!
- The opening chapter of Bill Bryson's wonderful At Home has a bit about the Crystal Palace:
> The Crystal Palace was at once the world’s largest building and its lightest, most ethereal one. Today we are used to encountering glass in volume, but to someone living in 1851 the idea of strolling through cubic acres of airy light inside a building was dazzling— indeed, giddying. The arriving visitor’s first sight of the Exhibition Hall from afar, glinting and transparent, is really beyond our imagining. It would have seemed as delicate and evanescent, as miraculously improbable, as a soap bubble. To anyone arriving at Hyde Park, the first sight of the Crystal Palace, floating above the trees, sparkling in sunshine, would have been a moment of knee-weakening splendor.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/20575/at-home-by-bil...
- It also doesn't address the fact that we've been genetically modifying (read: breeding) plants to be eaten for around 10,000 years. Most of the plants we eat are nothing like their wild antecedents. Compare maize to teosinte, for instance. Or cultivated potatoes to the wild tubers they were bred from -- the wild ones will kill you, full stop.
(As an aside, I highly recommend Bill Bryson's "At Home," which discusses these topics and many more related to how we came to live the lives we do -- it's a great companion to A Short History of Nearly Everything.)
- Maximum City, a nonfiction book about Mumbai. A good companion to a first time visitor. I believe that an update is coming out soon.
Project Hail Mary, a book about space for engineering nerds.
The Body and At Home. They're books by Bill Bryson. He geeks out about stuff and showers is with fascinating trivia. It's hard to put his books down.
The Right Stuff, a book about how they picked the first astronauts without knowing what the job would even entail. A fascinating look at the psychology of test pilots. Pairs well with the movie First Man.
- Anything by Bill Bryson, but especially “At Home” and “One Summer: America, 1927”. Both are brilliant.
“John Adams” by David McCullough. Possibly the best historical bio ever.
“The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes. The best recounting of the founding of Los Alamos.
“Hackers” by Steven Levy. The best book on the birth of creatine coding.
“The Soul of a New Machine” by Tracy Kidder. The best tale of hardware design I know.
“Masters of Doom” by David Kushner. The best book on the early days of gaming, esp. about Carmack and Romero.
Anything by Eric Raymond, esp. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
- If you want to further develop that gratitude, you might like At Home by Bill Bryson (and everything else he wrote, really)
