Author: Bill Bryson
Title: At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Publication Info: Books On Tape (2010), Audio CD
ISBN: 9780307707376
Books Read by the Same Author:
- A Short History of Nearly Everything
- A Walk in the Woods
- Notes from a Small Island
- In a Sunburned Country
- I’m A Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years…
- The Mother Tongue
- The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America
- Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
- Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United…
Summary/Review:
Bill Bryson travels through his English home and uses it as a launching point for this history of the uses of the rooms and the types of things one finds in each spot. It’s something of a cluttered attic of a book (pun intended) with little bits of cultural history, material culture, architecture, and all sorts of odds and ends. To be honest I listened to some of the audio discs out of order and didn’t realize it at first, so linearity is not important to this work. While focusing on the broad topic of the home and private life, the focus of the book tends to stick with British and American history, and while some examples go back to Classical times most of the book is set in the past three centuries with the Victorian Era being Bryson’s favorite. It’s a nice bit of compiled history told with Bryson’s usual wit and insight, although surprisingly his own voice is not as prevalent in this intimate book as it is in his other works.
Recommended books: How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built by Stewart Brand, The Archaeology of Home: An Epic Set on 1000 Square Feet of the Lower East Side by Katharine Greider and In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life by James Deetz
Rating: ***1/2
