“Notes from a Small Island” by Bill Bryson

l believe this is the book that made Bill Bryson famous and launched his career of writing factoid-rich travel books, coupled with a narrative of his own experiences. It works really well most of the time…sadly not quite so much here, or else maybe he hadn’t really hit his stride yet? Part of the issue is that he really comes across as a jerk in a lot of his interactions with, and what he writes about, the locals.

In this book, he travels around Great Britain one last time, as he is due to move back to America after living in England for twenty years. One place he commends greatly is Durham and its cathedral – interestingly, he must have impressed someone there because, after spending a few years in the States, he returned to England as Chancellor of Durham University!

“A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson

This book is a fun account of Bill Bryson hiking a good chunk of the Appalachian Trail with an old friend. It really inspires you to get out in nature … although half the joy of long hiking trips is coming back home and appreciating all the modern comforts and conveniences of life with fresh eyes.

Quite a few places I bookmarked for traveling to, some day. I have always lived out West so much of Appalachia is foreign to me.

One interesting fact shared by Bryson is the the US Forest Service is more of a road construction and maintenance organization than anything else. These roads are primarily to benefit loggers.

“The Body” by Bill Bryson

At times, this book felt like factoid upon factoid, strung together with witty Bryson commentary.  Which, I suppose, it is.  He goes through the whole body, system by system, expressing wonder at the complexities and also presenting the related biological and medical science history.  Of necessity, the information in the book is a mile wide and an inch deep, but Bryson really is an entertaining author.  He’s not a science expert at all, just a well-read layperson with a gift for explanation, but the book has a substantial set of citations so I don’t have any reason to doubt anything.

Anyway, my big take away was how complex our bodies and biology really are.  There’s so much going on, all at the same time.  Countless multitudes of confounding factors and problems unamenable to easy study result in Bryson writing something like “the experts really don’t know” every other page or so.  It is amazing how much medical advancements have come in the past hundred years or so, despite us not really understanding the full picture of what’s going on for hardly anything biological at all.

Another (related) thought is how we might have already exhausted the low-hanging fruit; any future improvements will take lots of effort to achieve.  But fortunately the low-hanging fruit got us pretty far.  Bryson has a paragraph in the closing chapter where he says “if we found a cure for all cancers tomorrow, it would add just 3.2 years to overall life expectancy.”  Heart disease, 5.5 years.  Alzheimer’s, only 19 days.  This is because each of those individually is rarer than average, and overwhelming afflict the elderly who have many other things to die from.  I guess aging in general is really the thing that needs to be tackled.  Also, the quality of life, not just longevity, needs to be improved — Bryson reports far too many people, close to 50%, have some sort of chronic pain they are dealing with.  Something to keep in mind when interacting with strangers…be kind, you don’t know what people are going through!

I started keeping notes on some interesting factoids, but kind of lost track since (as I said above) that’s pretty much the gist of the book – interesting factoid upon interesting factoid.  Anyway, here are a few I did record:

• Individual hairs on our head will last about 5-7 years.
• The total number of human cells and microbe cells in a body are about evenly split, 30 trillion each.
• The area your eyes can focus on is only the size of your fingertip held at arm’s length.  To compensate, our brain is constantly reconstructing the scene around us.  Our eyes dart about frequently without us really knowing it.
• Similarly, the flavor of food is constructed in the brain from a mix of visual, smell, and taste sensors.
• The chin doesn’t really have a biological purpose.  Same with eyebrows and eyelashes.
• Humans are the only mammal to release tears as emotional response.  Also we are one of the few mammals to have the “whites of our eyes” – it is thought that these (and maybe those eyebrows/chin) are useful in facilitating silent communication among hunting parties.  Conversely, for most other animals dark eyes are preferred for avoiding being spotted at night by predators.
• Lots of suboptimal things in our bodies: heart tissue and ear hairs which detect high frequencies and many other organs don’t regenerate; our propensity for choking due to shared air and food tube arrangement.

“One Summer: America, 1927” by Bill Bryson

Excellent Bill Bryson as always.  A snapshot look at what was happening in America in the summer of 1927.  Of course, most of these events had backstory and aftermath that went beyond that summer, but nonetheless:

• The biggest story by far was Charles Lindbergh‘s crossing of the Atlantic.  The event generated tons of enthusiasm; this was almost as big a deal and as incredible to imagine as the moon landing would be a generation later.   But, what really may have made the most lasting impact was Lindbergh’s follow-up cross-country tour, where he appeared in parades and other events in different cities day after day.  There was heavy press coverage; and reports of it taking him only a few hours by air to travel between cities which took a day or more by train caused interest and investment in aviation.
  • A side note to the Lindbergh story is that of Charles Levine, one of his competitors to be the first across the Atlantic by plane.  It’s almost a fable-like story: he (well, his plane the Columbia) probably would have been first if only Levine wasn’t such a big jerk.  He had two pilots lined up for the flight but kicked one out at the last minute in favor of taking a spot for himself; this pilot got an injunction that stopped the flight for a week or more.  Which is when Lindbergh took off.
• Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs playing for the 1927 Yankees, considered by many the best team ever.  He was known as “Babe” because of his sheltered upbringing at a boys school/orphanage.  Apparently he quickly lost the boyish innocence; he was a well known womanizer and drinker.
• President Coolidge spent the summer in South Dakota, modeling a fancy cowboy outfit.  Also he participated in the kickoff for Mt. Rushmore.  The creator, Gutzon Borglum, was an interesting fellow and a Mormon (or at least started out as one.)
• Prohibition was in full swing.  I didn’t realize that the government intentionally poisoned “denatured” alcohol, an idea encouraged by Wayne Wheeler and the Anti Saloon League, so it wouldn’t be used for drinking – many thousands were killed anyway.
• The curious Van Sweringen brothers were building the Terminal Tower in Cleveland, a prototype of the modern shopping mall.  They also invented the suburb in Shaker Heights.  The Van Sweringens lost everything in the Great Depression.
• Error in the book!  Said Philo Farnsworth went to “Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City”.  It’s really in Provo, which no one outside of Utah would lump together with Salt Lake City.
• The advent of “talkie” movies = start of dominant American culture worldwide.  Before this, many actors were immigrants – didn’t matter that they had an accent or couldn’t speak English well.  Now, the movie star image around the world became totally American.

“A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson

The mark of a good journalist is being able to simply explain difficult concepts.  Bryson does so in an entertaining way in this history of science (similar ground covered by The Discoverers).  I also liked Richard Matthews’ crisp British accent in this unabridged audiobook.

The flow was very good.  Generally, it follows investigations into a few “big questions” that ultimately spawned entirely new scientific disciplines, or significant overhauls to existing ones: measuring the size of the Earth for astronomy and physics; estimating the age of the Earth for geology and biology.

One thing about science is that it is always changing.  Plenty of examples in this book about theories which were widely accepted in their day, but a completely discredited today in favor of something else.  This is good.  But whenever the current “correct” theory is discussed, Bryson seems to treat it as fact when it is simply our current best guess.  This is pretty excusable though — constantly harping on the uncertainties would cause the average reader to come away with more questions than “answers” … (but maybe that is good for science…)

The other takeaway is how seemingly vulnerable we are.  As an example of the civilization and perhaps species-ending events which may occur at any time and without warning are: a powerful solar flare which rips away the ionosphere and irradiates all life on Earth; the Yellowstone supervolcano blowing and covering North America in several feet of ash and inducing a new ice age; a large asteroid striking the Earth with a similar effect.

“The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” by Bill Bryson

Audiobook version

Unofficial subtitle: “Bill Bryson Tells Us About All The Gross Stuff He Did as a Kid in 1950’s Iowa”

Not much to say really beyond the subtitle.  It’s a (short) collection of Bryson’s humorous reminisces about growing up, as well as a look back on what life in middle America was like in the Fifties.  At one point, Bryson nicely summed up the decade as one of “undiluted optimism and eager despair” — never before had standards of living risen so high so quickly for so many, but also never before had there existed the real possibility of total annihilation (from Soviet atomic weapons).  Even still, people seemed fascinated by the new technology, just as they were by the newest model cars or new washing machines.

On that note, one of the more memorable accounts in the book was of the largest-ever atomic drill conducted in New York City, which took place in 1951.  Everybody was expected to drop whatever they were doing and hasten to the nearest designated fallout shelter.  Well almost everybody.  The only citizens excepted were restaurant patrons and workers.  It was thought that if customers were excused for an hour or so, very few would return to pay their bill!

Another note – Bill Bryson reads the audio version himself, and by golly he has a very strange accent!  From Iowa, of course, but he moved to England in his 20’s and has lived there more or less since.  So he has quite an odd British-American combo accent, I thought.