Tuesday, 12 January 2021

Book Review-A Short history of nearly everything!!

 


That's exactly what the book is! The book is authored by Bill Bryson and is a marvellous work of non-fiction. The book explores the origin of our universe with us and everything in it, unravels how earth formed, plunges deep into the world of microparticles-the atoms, neutrons, electrons and many more and then weaves delicately through the world of dinosaurs, microorganisms and finally, humans. 

My personal experience while reading this book was that of wonder and admiration. I cannot but take a bow of respect to the level of preparation, commitment and hardwork that must have gone in making this happen. It is not out of place to feel whether a complete work of non fiction would be boring in some way but on the contrary. The way it is written keeps you intrigued and curious to find out more. I suspect the reason for this that all these facts are expressed through stories of the works and lives of great men and women. The language is simple yet has a certain rapture of mystery which makes you turn pages.

To state an example: A paragraph from the book "When you sit on a chair, your body is not actually in contact. The bottom is levitating at an angstrom level( a hundred milionth of a centimetre) above which is not evident to the naked eye. The rationale is your and electrons will oppose as they come close and push each other away. So essentially, we are floating but at micro-micro-micro units".

So you see, the books shows the mysterious world we live in. It gave me  glimpses into the lessons of physics, chemistry and geology that i had done while in school and hence, there was this whiff of kind nostalgia that could not be ignored. I think it a brilliant book, long and brain-racking but definitely worth a read.

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