

S'està carregant… At Home: A Short History of Private Lifede Bill Bryson
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No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. Bill Bryson's look at the history of the home reveals a so many things -- a long term view of that most intimate place, a new angle on history, and a multitude of facts, stories, and really interesting tidbits. He ranges over swathes of the history of things, much of it obscure and some of it startling. Like most Bryson books, it is a delightful read, luring you on to take in just one more chapter. ( ![]() I am probably missing a lot of interesting information and important historical facts about everyday living by not finishing this book, but it was just too much. I liked the book and skipped around to different parts, but couldn't read it all the way thru. Lots of good interesting tidbits. But that was really all there was; interesting tidbits British author Bill Bryson's enthusiasm for history is contagious and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to At Home - A Short History of Private Life. In this offering, Bryson looks at the history of private life by breaking down our domestic lives and examining them through the lens of the rooms contained within the Victorian parsonage in which he lives. Read by the author in his instantly recognisable delivery (now a favourite audiobook narrator alongside Hugh Mackay and David Sedaris) the book contains 19 chapters including: The Study, The Attic, The Bedroom, The Scullery and Larder, and The Nursery to name a few. My favourite chapter by far was The Stairs, as I'm fascinated by just how dangerous and deadly the stairs were in households. The stairs used by servants and domestic staff were steep, cramped, and often included steps of uneven height. This was a disaster waiting to happen for staff rushing up and down stairs countless times a day, and was the cause of many accidents and deaths. The role of clergy and their subsequent decline was interesting, although Bryson seemed to deviate from his own structure on occasion to expound on other tangential topics of interest. Finding the majority of the content presented interesting, I didn't mind this at all, however some readers might. Informative, educational and entertaining, I can highly recommend At Home - A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson and will check out more of his works in the future. Bryson's history of everyday life has his trademark charm and seeming effortlessness. Greatly enjoyed it, and recommend it as a bracing dose of anti-nostalgia. On balance the good old days were always more nasty, brutish and short than the present.
“At Home” is baggy, loose-jointed and genial. It moves along at a vigorously restless pace, with the energy of a Labrador retriever off the leash, racing up to each person it encounters, pawing and sniffing and barking at every fragrant thing, plunging into icy waters only to dash off again, invigorated. You do, somehow, maintain forward momentum and eventually get to the end. Bryson is fascinated by everything, and his curiosity is infectious. Bryson is certainly famous enough to have got away with a far less bulging compendium. Instead, on our behalf, he’s been through those hundreds of books (508 according to the bibliography) some of which even the most assiduous readers among us might never have got around to: Jacques Gelis’s History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern Europe, say, or John A Templer’s The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls and Safer Designs. He’s then extracted their most arresting material and turned the result into a book that, for all its winning randomness, is not just hugely readable but a genuine page-turner — mainly because you can’t wait to see what you’ll find out next.
Bryson takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, showing how each room has figured in the evolution of private life. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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