At Home: A Short History of Private Life
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From the Introduction:
"...whatever happens in the world--whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over--eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment--they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the fold of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. so the history of household life isn't just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up."
My review: I'm a big Bryson fan for his quirky style and wide-ranging intellect and in At Home he doesn't disappoint. Bryson uses his own home, a Victorian parsonage in a rural part of England, as the touchstone to this work. He takes us from the front hall to the attic in a peripatetic journey through the history of everyday things and the uses of private space. In between he talks about the people who invented gadgets, designed buildings, discovered scientific principals, set sartorial standards, and built sewers, among many, many others. Although the secondary title is A Short History of Private Life, this book ranges through public life, politics, the Industrial Revolution and, most particularly, the Victorian Era.
I rated this only slightly better than average, because I felt Bryson made some odd choices in structuring his tale. The most weird (for me) was the discussion of death and burial practices as part of the discussion around the bedroom. Bryson makes the transition from the development of the bed and bedclothes, to sex, marriage, venereal disease, surgical techniques, anesthesiology, death, mourning and burial. It seemed to me the living room or drawing room would have been a better spot, since people were frequently "laid out" in their homes before the recent advent of funeral parlors. Of course, the use of house as a structure for providing disparate chunks of information is an artificial construct. In some ways, the book felt like the left over pieces from Bryson's masterpiece A Short History of Nearly Everything.
In spite of the inherent artificiality, the book is fun, an easy read, constantly surprising and I recommend it. Bryson provides an extensive bibliography (21 pages) and comprehensive index (20 pages.) This goes on my husbands TBR pile, so it probably won't be available for quite a while.
"...whatever happens in the world--whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over--eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment--they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the fold of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. so the history of household life isn't just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up."
My review: I'm a big Bryson fan for his quirky style and wide-ranging intellect and in At Home he doesn't disappoint. Bryson uses his own home, a Victorian parsonage in a rural part of England, as the touchstone to this work. He takes us from the front hall to the attic in a peripatetic journey through the history of everyday things and the uses of private space. In between he talks about the people who invented gadgets, designed buildings, discovered scientific principals, set sartorial standards, and built sewers, among many, many others. Although the secondary title is A Short History of Private Life, this book ranges through public life, politics, the Industrial Revolution and, most particularly, the Victorian Era.
I rated this only slightly better than average, because I felt Bryson made some odd choices in structuring his tale. The most weird (for me) was the discussion of death and burial practices as part of the discussion around the bedroom. Bryson makes the transition from the development of the bed and bedclothes, to sex, marriage, venereal disease, surgical techniques, anesthesiology, death, mourning and burial. It seemed to me the living room or drawing room would have been a better spot, since people were frequently "laid out" in their homes before the recent advent of funeral parlors. Of course, the use of house as a structure for providing disparate chunks of information is an artificial construct. In some ways, the book felt like the left over pieces from Bryson's masterpiece A Short History of Nearly Everything.
In spite of the inherent artificiality, the book is fun, an easy read, constantly surprising and I recommend it. Bryson provides an extensive bibliography (21 pages) and comprehensive index (20 pages.) This goes on my husbands TBR pile, so it probably won't be available for quite a while.
