American-British Author Bill Bryson Is Worth Reading
November 11, 2019 at 11:32 p.m.
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If someone were to ask me who my favorite contemporary writer is, I would without hesitation say Bill Bryson, of course.
Although not thought of as a science author, he has written about the universe, the human body and in his book about Australia, snakes, spiders and deadly fish.
He is also prolific. In chronological order, his titles include “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America,” “The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way,” “Neither Here Nor There, Made in America: An informal History of the English Language in the United States,” “Notes From a Small Island,” “A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail,” “Notes From a Big Country,” “Down Under, Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words,” “At Home: a Short History of Private Lives,” “Walk About, A Short History of Just About Everything,” “Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society,” “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid,” “Shakespeare: the World as Stage, One Summer America 1927” and his latest, “The Body: A Guide for Occupants.”
Most of the books are classified as either travel, language, history or science. Moreover, they are all entertaining and fun to read. He won the Aventis Prize for Science Books in 2004 and was awarded the Descartes Science Communication Prize in 2005.
I am currently reading his latest, “The Body: A Guide for Occupants.” Anyone interested in science will find it most enlightening. In the section on elements that make up the human body, Bryson had this to say, “That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us - that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt. I’ve said it before in another book, but I believe it’s worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.”
He also wrote that it takes 7 billion billion billion (that’s 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you. No one can say why those 7 billion billion billion have such an urgent desire to be you. They are mindless particles, after all, without a single thought or notion between them. Yet somehow for the length of your existence, they will build and maintain all the countless systems and structures necessary to keep you humming, to make you you, to give you form and shape and let you enjoy the rare and supremely agreeable condition known as life. Bryson is truly gifted, he writes sentences you like to read over and over again.
In his book “Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society,” Bryson described the background behind the Rev. Thomas Bayes and derivation of his famous theorem in the mid 1750s. The remarkable feature is that it had no practical applications in his own lifetime.
Although simple cases yield simple sums, most uses demand serious computational power to do the volume of calculations. So in Bayes’ day, it was simply an interesting but largely pointless exercise. Bayes evidently thought so little of his theorem that he didn’t bother to publish it. It was a friend who sent it to the Royal Society in London in 1763, two years after Bayes’ death, where it was published in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions with the modest title of “An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances.”
In fact, it was a milestone in the history of mathematics. Bayes’ theorem is used routinely in the modelling of climate change and weather forecasting generally, in interpreting radiocarbon dates, in social policy, astrophysics, stock market analysis, clinical trials and wherever else probability is a problem. And its discoverer is remembered today simply because nearly 250 years ago someone at the Royal Society decided it was worth preserving his work, just in case.
Bryson’s research frequently uncovers new and odd information. His book about Shakespeare is surprising in that there is little known about the greatest writer of them all.
“Although he left nearly a million words of text, we have just 14 words in his own hand - his name signed six times and the words “by me” on his will. Not a single note or letter or page of manuscript survives. (Some authorities believe that a section of the play “Sir Thomas More,” which was never performed, is in Shakespeare’s hand, but that is far from certain.) We have no written description of him penned in his own lifetime. The first textual portrait - “he was a handsome, well-shap’t man: very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt” - was written 64 years after his death by a man, John Aubrey, who was born 10 years after that death.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
If someone were to ask me who my favorite contemporary writer is, I would without hesitation say Bill Bryson, of course.
Although not thought of as a science author, he has written about the universe, the human body and in his book about Australia, snakes, spiders and deadly fish.
He is also prolific. In chronological order, his titles include “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America,” “The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way,” “Neither Here Nor There, Made in America: An informal History of the English Language in the United States,” “Notes From a Small Island,” “A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail,” “Notes From a Big Country,” “Down Under, Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words,” “At Home: a Short History of Private Lives,” “Walk About, A Short History of Just About Everything,” “Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society,” “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid,” “Shakespeare: the World as Stage, One Summer America 1927” and his latest, “The Body: A Guide for Occupants.”
Most of the books are classified as either travel, language, history or science. Moreover, they are all entertaining and fun to read. He won the Aventis Prize for Science Books in 2004 and was awarded the Descartes Science Communication Prize in 2005.
I am currently reading his latest, “The Body: A Guide for Occupants.” Anyone interested in science will find it most enlightening. In the section on elements that make up the human body, Bryson had this to say, “That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us - that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt. I’ve said it before in another book, but I believe it’s worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.”
He also wrote that it takes 7 billion billion billion (that’s 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you. No one can say why those 7 billion billion billion have such an urgent desire to be you. They are mindless particles, after all, without a single thought or notion between them. Yet somehow for the length of your existence, they will build and maintain all the countless systems and structures necessary to keep you humming, to make you you, to give you form and shape and let you enjoy the rare and supremely agreeable condition known as life. Bryson is truly gifted, he writes sentences you like to read over and over again.
In his book “Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society,” Bryson described the background behind the Rev. Thomas Bayes and derivation of his famous theorem in the mid 1750s. The remarkable feature is that it had no practical applications in his own lifetime.
Although simple cases yield simple sums, most uses demand serious computational power to do the volume of calculations. So in Bayes’ day, it was simply an interesting but largely pointless exercise. Bayes evidently thought so little of his theorem that he didn’t bother to publish it. It was a friend who sent it to the Royal Society in London in 1763, two years after Bayes’ death, where it was published in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions with the modest title of “An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances.”
In fact, it was a milestone in the history of mathematics. Bayes’ theorem is used routinely in the modelling of climate change and weather forecasting generally, in interpreting radiocarbon dates, in social policy, astrophysics, stock market analysis, clinical trials and wherever else probability is a problem. And its discoverer is remembered today simply because nearly 250 years ago someone at the Royal Society decided it was worth preserving his work, just in case.
Bryson’s research frequently uncovers new and odd information. His book about Shakespeare is surprising in that there is little known about the greatest writer of them all.
“Although he left nearly a million words of text, we have just 14 words in his own hand - his name signed six times and the words “by me” on his will. Not a single note or letter or page of manuscript survives. (Some authorities believe that a section of the play “Sir Thomas More,” which was never performed, is in Shakespeare’s hand, but that is far from certain.) We have no written description of him penned in his own lifetime. The first textual portrait - “he was a handsome, well-shap’t man: very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt” - was written 64 years after his death by a man, John Aubrey, who was born 10 years after that death.
Max Sherman is a medical writer and pharmacist retired from the medical device industry. He has taught college courses on regulatory and compliance issues at Ivy Tech, Grace College and Butler University. Sherman has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge on all levels. Eclectic Science, the title of his column, touches on famed doctors and scientists, human senses, aging, various diseases, and little-known facts about many species, including their contributions to scientific research. He can be reached by email at [email protected].
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