In this entertaining read the celebrated travel writer Bill Bryson takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the history of modern science. Bryson says that he was inspired to write the book when he realized how little he actually knew about how and why things are the way that they are. The book takes on a significant challenge. Had it included too much science we laymen would have been overwhelmed. Too little and the book would have failed in its aim to educate the reader. Fortunately for us Bryson gets it just right. His no nonsense, conversational writing style makes the book a breeze to read. He frequently refers to the fact that many great ideas have lain uncelebrated in daunting prose because the discoverer was a brilliant scientist but a really poor writer.

So what we get is a potted history of the major breakthroughs and developments in all of the major sciences as well as simple and understandable explanations of the concepts behind them. But in doing all of this he also gives us potted biographies of the famous and not so famous scientists who made those discoveries and it is in this fleshing out of the characters of science and their rivalries that the book excels. In this endeavor Bryson is helped out by the fact that so very many scientists are, putting it very mildly, eccentric.

Amongst the surprising revelations of the book are the following:

- Why many physicists think that Albert Einstein wasted the second half of his life.

- That It is thought that every single atom of our bodies is replaced every nine years – so we really aren’t who we used to be.

- That Charles Darwin left “On the origin of Species” in a drawer for fifteen years whilst he fathered ten children and spent eight years writing a book on Barnacles.

Bryson has written an enthralling and ambitious book that educates as much as it entertains and is never dull or dry. There aren’t too many scientists around who could make a similar claim.

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