![]() Regardless, both authors had similar impulses: to communicate science, medicine, history, geography, what-have-you, simply, for anyone to read. Far more than Bryson, Stokes Brown is now seen as somebody with an important approach to history: that human history cannot be fully understood without taking a much longer view of history in general, human and otherwise. It was called Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present. Bryson's celebrated book was the sort of thing academic historians today have a phrase for: "big history." Just four years after A Short History was published, the historian Cynthia Stokes Brown released a book with a similar scope. Of course we loved A Short History - as did everybody else, it seems. It's easy to imagine precocious teenagers reading Bryson's new book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, in much the same spirit. ![]() When I was a teenager, I had an argument with a close friend about Bill Bryson.īoth of us were competitive debaters, which meant we actively sought out sweeping, magisterial works like A Short History of Nearly Everything - something from which we could glean as much as possible from as little as possible. ![]() ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. ![]() Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Body Subtitle A Guide for Occupants Author Bill Bryson ![]()
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![]() What this ad acknowledges is that you’ve been eating all these snacks and yet you are not happy, and you’ve been watching all these shows and yet you still feel lonely, and you’ve been seeing all this news and yet the world makes no sense, and you’ve been playing all these games and yet the melancholy sinks deeper and deeper into you. Even the things we do to escape the sadness of our lives have themselves become sad. ![]() “But here’s the thing,” Periwinkle continues, his eyes all aglow, “even the things we do to break the routine become routine. ![]() Why does one eat a snack? Why is a snack necessary? The answer-and we’ve done a million studies on this-is because our lives are filled with tedium and drudgery and endless toil and we need a tiny blip of pleasure to repel the gathering darkness. ![]() ![]() ![]()
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