Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Popular UK-based writer Bryson (www.billbrysonbooks.com)-whose Aventis Prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) is also available from Books on Tape/Random Audio-here uncovers the stories of how various ordinary objects in his home came to be, taking listeners along on one wild historical tangent after another. He explores everything from the spice trade to the toilet bowl, revealing the hilarious and revolting details of our private lives from Roman times to the present. Bryson's fact-based writing seems almost fiction-like because of his ability to tease eccentric facts and characters out of even the most banal topic. He himself narrates, reading in a deadpan voice perfectly suited to the text. Fans of Bryson's previous works will be pleased, as will those who enjoy their nonfiction with a fun, witty edge. [The book's "eclectic, ambulatory arrangement will delight many but baffle others," read the review of the Doubleday pb original, LJ 9/1/10.-Ed.]-Johannah Genett, Hennepin P.L., Minneapolis (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly Review
Bryson (A Short History of Everything) takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, and finds it crammed with 10,000 years of fascinating historical bric-a-brac. Each room becomes a starting point for a free-ranging discussion of rarely noticed but foundational aspects of social life. A visit to the kitchen prompts disquisitions on food adulteration and gluttony; a peek into the bedroom reveals nutty sex nostrums and the horrors of premodern surgery; in the study we find rats and locusts; a stop in the scullery illuminates the put-upon lives of servants. Bryson follows his inquisitiveness wherever it goes, from Darwinian evolution to the invention of the lawnmower, while savoring eccentric characters and untoward events (like Queen Elizabeth I's pilfering of a subject's silverware). There are many guilty pleasures, from Bryson's droll prose-"What really turned the Victorians to bathing, however, was the realization that it could be gloriously punishing"-to the many tantalizing glimpses behind closed doors at aristocratic English country houses. In demonstrating how everything we take for granted, from comfortable furniture to smoke-free air, went from unimaginable luxury to humdrum routine, Bryson shows us how odd and improbable our own lives really are. (Oct. 5) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Bryson, author of A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) and A Walk in the Woods (2009), lives in a Victorian parsonage built in 1851. He uses the old house with its long history and mundane domestic items to explore the evolution of the home. His detailed tour is a seamless meandering from room to room, subject to subject, with fascinating digressions. He touches on how the hall evolved from a grand room, the most important in the house, to just a place to wipe feet and hang hats ; how rooms developed based on changing notions of utility and privacy; how the development of the fireplace led to the development of the second floor. He offers historical and cultural origins of the names of rooms and common household items: table, chair, cookware, bedchamber, closet, study. He details how the development of different materials bricks to make chimneys and coal for fuel changed housing construction. The chapter on the kitchen prompts a discourse on food contamination, ice and mason jars, cookbooks and measuring utensils. A beautifully written ode to the ordinary and overlooked things of everyday life in the home.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
Kirkus Book Review
Bryson (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, 2006, etc.) takes a delightful stroll through the history of domestic life.Now living in a 19th-century church rectory in Norfolk, England, the author decided to learn about the ordinary things of life by exploring each room in his house. In each, he finds the stories that make up this discursive romp through British and American life of the last 150 years. The hall, a large barn-like space with an open hearth, was once the most important room in the house. Indeed, the smoke-filled hall "wasthe house" until the introduction of chimneys, which allowed houses to grow upward. In the kitchen, Bryson discusses such matters as canning, refrigeration and the serial plagiarist Isabella Beeton's hugely successful Book of Household Management(1859), which guided homemakers into the 20th century. In the bedroom, the author considers masturbation, syphilis and Victorian advice on how women could avoid arousal by not using their brains excessively. Aspects of other rooms prompt Bryson to relate stories about the spice trade, the rise of cities, Chippendale furniture, the servant class, kerosene, Gilded Age excess, home gardening, epidemics, mousetraps, electricity, arsenic-laced wallpaper, bats, Central Park, fabrics, water cures and the many ways in which people fall down stairs. He traces the derivation of domestic terms, such as ground floor (bare earth floors), the drawing or living room (originally the "withdrawing" room) and boarders (from dining table or "board"); describes the building of homes from Monticello and Mount Vernon to George Washington Vanderbilt's 250-room Biltmore in North Carolina; and offers wonderful anecdotes, including that of Lord Charles Beresford, a famous rake who, confused by weekend crowding at a country house, entered what he thought was his mistress's bedroom, cried "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" and leapt into a bed occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife. In a sense, Bryson's book is a history of "getting comfortable slowly," and he notes that flushing toilets were the most popular feature at the Crystal Palace exhibition in 1851.Informative, readable and great fun.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.