At Home: A Short History of Private Life

At Home: A Short History of Private Life
by
Bill Bryson
read by
Bill Bryson

A quarter of a million buried in sight of his house? Holy crap.
We start off looking at the "Great Exhibition" in 1851, with Bryson explaining how the Crystal Palace came about as well as comparing and contrasting with with parsonages in the English countryside.
Before getting us into the house, Bryson takes us on an adventure of why we even have houses which includes a discussion on corn and potatoes along the way. We do finally get into the house where we move to look at the Hall. Thanks to Mr. Bryson I now know where the term "board" from room and board, came from as well as why the Chairman of the Board is called thus. I'd always wondered why they were called what they were called.
Bryson spends a chapter talking about lighting in homes from medieval times to the present. It appears that I like many before me believed erroneously that it wasn't until the invention of the modern oil lamp in the 19th century that everyone just went to bed early, but it seems that they kept hours not very different from those people keep now. People just did everything in a lot less light. I could not imagine trying to read by candlelight for more than a few minutes at a time, not for hours every day. This leads naturally into a conversation about petroleum and petroleum products. It's interesting to note that kerosene was the desired product and not gasoline in the very beginning. It is hardly that way now.
What really gets me is how many times throughout our history - being European and American history as the story is being told thus far - people with little or no experience in a given area come up with an amazing solution, one which should make them rich and famous, but doesn't because industry just steals their ideas and refuses to pay them. It seems the men die horrible deaths, penniless after as often as not spending their lives in the court system trying to get what should be rightfully theirs. I also really like that Bryson pronounces 'patent' with a long "ay" sound for "pay-tent".
And just when you think you're all safe listening to a great history lesson, he springs epidemics and rats at you. I did not need to know that every year in the U.S. 14,000 people are attacked by rats, nor that one quarter of all housefires without an obvious cause are attributed to rats gnawing through the electrical wiring. No. I did not need to hear that at all. But the rats compare little to the talk of all the insects and microbes. Just always remember to close the lid before flushing the toilet.
Bryson spends quite a bit of time on gardens particularly in his native Britain. As someone who spent a considerable period of time with a Landscape Architect, I found this particularly interesting and found myself wishing that I had known the history of Landscape Architecture years ago. Or, as I will think of it for a while, Landskip.
Bryson moves smoothly from Landscape Architecture to Architecture itself. He starts in Italy with Pilladio and how he shaped Architecture starting in 16th century influencing the Western world. He traces Palladianism into the New World with Monticello, through Jefferson's eccentricities on to the problems between Britain and America that led to the Revolutionary War and then on to Washington's home, Mount Vernon. Where Jefferson was the tinkerer, Washington was the pragmatist and a surprisingly good architect.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life at Amazon.com