One of the worlds most beloved writers and New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body takes his ultimate journeyinto the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer. In A Walk in the Woods Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trailwell most of it. In A Sunburned Country he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now in his biggest book he confronts his greatest challenge to understandand if possible answerthe oldest biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end he has attached himself to a host of the worlds most advanced and often obsessed archaeologists anthropologists and mathematicians travelling to their offices laboratories and field camps. He has read or tried to read their books pestered them with questions apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest and it is a sometimes profound sometimes funny and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining. show more