At Home(ISBN=9780767919388)

Starred Review. Bryson (A Short History of Everything) takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, and finds it crammed with 10,000 years of fascinating historical bric-a-brac. Each room becomes a starting point for a free-ranging discussion of rarely noticed but foundational aspects of social life. A visit to the kitchen prompts disquisitions on food adulteration and gluttony; a peek into the bedroom reveals nutty sex nostrums and the horrors of premodern surgery; in the study we find rats and locusts; a stop in the scullery illuminates the put-upon lives of servants. Bryson follows his inquisitiveness wherever it goes, from Darwinian evolution to the invention of the lawnmower, while savoring eccentric characters and untoward events (like Queen Elizabeth I's pilfering of a subject's silverware). There are many guilty pleasures, from Bryson's droll prose--"What really turned the Victorians to bathing, however, was the realization that it could be gloriously punishing"--to the many tantalizing glimpses behind closed doors at aristocratic English country houses. In demonstrating how everything we take for granted, from comfortable furniture to smoke-free air, went from unimaginable luxury to humdrum routine, Bryson shows us how odd and improbable our own lives really are.
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From one of the most beloved authors of our  time—more than six million copies of his books have been sold in this country alone—a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home.

“Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.”
 
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. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to “write a history of the world without leaving home.” The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutrition and the spice trade; and so on, as Bryson shows how each has fig?ured in the evolution of private life. Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.

Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and he is a master at turning the seemingly isolated or mundane fact into an occasion for the most diverting exposi?tion imaginable. His wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life.

BILL BRYSON’s books include A Walk in the Woods, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, Bryson’s Book of Troublesome Words, A Short History of Nearly Everything (which earned him the 2004 Aventis Prize), The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Bryson lives in England with his wife and children.

INTRODUCTION 
I  THE YEAR 
II  THE SETTING 
III  THE HALL 
IV  THE KITCHEN 
V  THE SCULLERY AND LARDER 
VI  THE FUSE BOX  Ill
VII  THE DRAWING ROOM 
VIII  THE DINING ROOM 
IX  THE CELLAR 
X  THE PASSAGE 
XI  THE STUDY 
XII  THE GARDEN 
XIII  THE PLUM ROOM 
XIV  THE STAIRS 
XV  THE BEDROOM 
XVE  THE BATHROOM 
XVII  THE DRESSING ROOM 
XVIII  THE NURSERY 
XIX  THE ATTIC 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS 
INDEX