At Home: A Short History of Private Life

From one of our most beloved authors, a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home — now richly illustrated with more than two hundred images in full color Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. But, struck one day by the thought that history mostly is masses of people doing ordinary things, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things in life — most of them found inside his front door. At Home is the bestselling story of Bryson's room-by-room journey around his house, a history of the world written without leaving home. The bathroom provides the occasion for the history of hygiene; the bedroom for an account of sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen for a discussion of nutrition and the spice trade. From architecture to electricity, from food preservation to epidemics, from the telephone to the Eiffel Tower, from crinolines to toilets — and the brilliant, creative, and often eccentric minds behind them — Bryson demonstrates that whatever happens in the world ends up in our houses, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture. In this handsome new edition of At Home, Bryson's sparkling prose is enhanced by some two hundred carefully curated full-color images. Selected from a wide array of sources, these illustrations vividly bring his fascinating and entertaining domestic adventure to visual life. Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and he is a master at turning the seemingly mundane into an occasion for the most diverting exposition imaginable. When you've finished this book, you'll see your house — and your daily life — in a new and revelatory light.