I have never read anything by Bill Bryson before as I'm not really into his usual genre of travel writing but I was given this by a friend. In short, it's a great book - I was hooked by the end of the introduction where he describes his early experiences with a textbook containing a cut-away of the earth illustrating the earth's interior. He asks "How did they know that?". A question which resonates from my own school years, where teachers would often avoid the question or provide some unconvincing answer. The book promised to provide some real answers.

As for the "nearly everything" description, he is not wrong. The book covers some five hundred years of scientific history and touches on subjects of cosmology, maths, physics, chemistry, geology, vulcanolgy and biology. We learn how to build a universe, how to measure the size of the earth, what the inside of an atom is like, how mountains are created (and destroyed), the precarious nature of life and how we came to be.

The whole text is littered with little tidbits of curiosity; like the person who really discovered something as opposed to the person given the credit and the back story to each scientific breakthrough. He must have expended a huge amount of energy to get all this in. All of this is told in a witty style that makes compelling reading.