There must be a lot of us who regret not getting into the really interesting stuff in science classes in high school and college. We helped put Bill Bryson's latest book on the bestseller lists. The book is titled *A Short History of Nearly Everything. (Back to the title in a minute.) Now, several of you share responsibility for me buying this book. You've raved about other Bill Bryson books. You're not solely responsible. I have read a couple of his books and had a great time with them. Plus the bookstore had a "30% Off" sticker on the book. Then there's the little matter of my curiosity about science stuff that I "don't know much about." I was a big time fan of Stephen Jay Gould. I've read some of Timothy Ferris' work. I was a fan of Bill Nye and Beakman when they were on TV (and David was younger so I could rationalize watching Saturday morning kids shows). I fondly remember listening to Mister Wizard back in the days of black and white TV. Somehow I missed most of Carl Sagan's epic adventures in the universe even though cosmology is, for me, the ultimate mystery story. Bryson was on my wavelength in his introduction. "To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you... "Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle... For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you -- indeed, they don't even know you are there... "To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business... It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it." This is not the smart mouth Bryson of his earlier books. Yes, he gets his irreverent zingers in now and again, but he's in too much awe of the subject to be really funny. Consider this: after describing how he was thrilled by the cut-away drawing of the earth in his grade school science textbook, he says, "äI couldn't for the life of me conceive how any human mind could work out what spaces thousands of miles below us, that no eye had ever seen and no X-ray could penetrate, could look like and be made of... "Excited, I took the book home that night and opened it before dinner...and, starting with the first page, I read. "And here's the thing. It wasn't exciting at alläit didn't answer any of the questions that the illustration stirred up in a normal inquiring mind: How did we end up with a Sun in the middle of our planet? And if it is burning away why isn't the ground under our feet hot to the touch? And why isn't the rest of the interior melting -- or is it...And how do you know this? How did you figure it out? "But the author was strangely silent on such details... It was as if he wanted to keep the good stuff secret by making all of it soberly unfathomable..." I was right with Bryson all the way. I finished that introduction with an enthusiasm to confront scientific cosmology in the first chapter. I was ready to hear a layman's explanation of how people had figured out what happened during the first seconds after the beginning of the big bang. Sadly he didn't deliver. He read and talked to people all over the world for three years, and maybe he found out. But he doesn't tell us in this book. He tells us what knowledgeable and thoughtful, people know and think. But he doesn't tell us very often how they got the to the tentative conclusions they hold. Bryson is in awe of the topics and the scientists. And too often all he does is to put into intelligible terms what scientists told him about the evolution of stars, the forces that hold atoms together, the structure of DNA, plate tectonics, ice ages, and the troposphere. Occasionally he describes how we know about the mantle and core of the earth or the size of the universe, but more often it's like this: "By such means does Darwinian natural selection look after us. It also helps explain why we are all so similar. Evolution simply won't let you become too different -- not without becoming a new species anyway." And I ask, "Because?" But the next paragraph goes on only to say that "...not only is it wrong to refer to 'the' human genome, but in a sense we don't even have 'a' human genome. We have six billion of them." I was almost as disappointed in his book as Bryson was disappointed in his grade school science book. This is more sophisticated than Bill Nye or Beakman, but it's Stephen Jay Gould light. Remember taking general science in ninth grade? Bill Hollister, my ninth grade science teacher and basketball coach was good at teaching it. But our textbook was a lot like the one Bryson describes ã just designed for ninth graders rather than 5th graders. Bryson's book is a grown up version of that ninth grade textbook, without any illustrations. I kept looking for some. It's much better than that ninth grade book. Bryson can write. He cracks a few jokes. He expresses real interest and affection for the topics. And, over and over again, he reminds us how much we (even the scientists) don't know. A hundred and some years ago, educated people suspected there wasn't much besides some details to learn about "life, the universe, and all that." These were people who weren't sure about how sperm fertilized eggs. Some of them respectably thought that sperm contained tiny complete beings. Just inconsequential details to figure out. With what humans have learned in the past 150 years, we might be tempted to similar assumptions. Bryson reminds us over and over again that there's so much we still don't know about ourselves, the earth we live on, and the universe we live in. For that alone it's a valuable book. I recommend it to you. If it's not 30% off in the bookstore, find it in the library or wait until Daedalas Books has remainders. By the way, the title might be a bit misleading. The "Everything" referred to is the material world. There's a bit of history about science, but nothing about politics. Technology is only mentioned as it contributes to scientific knowledge. So you'll not read anything about '58 Chevies or iPods. Psychology and love are peripheral and only hinted at. There's nothing after the introduction about education or childhood. You'll have to take the phrase "nearly everything" with a pound or two of salt.

• Bryson's publisher's web site

• A review from Pop Matters Books

• A review from The American Scientist online