At Home
A Short History of Private Life
by Bill Bryson
Mem. Ed. $20.49
Pub. Ed. $28.95
You pay $0.20
Bonus Content
At Home
In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of ground and containing within its airy vastness enough room for four St. Paul's Cathedrals. For the short time of its existence, it was the biggest building on Earth. Known formally as the Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, it was incontestably magnificent, but all the more so for being so sudden, so startlingly glassy, so gloriously and unexpectedly there. Douglas Jerrold, a columnist for the weekly magazine Punch, dubbed it the Crystal Palace, and the name stuck.
It had taken just five months to build. It was a miracle that it was built at all. Less than a year earlier it had not even existed as an idea. The exhibition for which it was conceived was the dream of a civil servant named Henry Cole, whose other principal claim to history's attention is as the inventor of the Christmas card (as a way of encouraging people to use the new penny post). In 1849, Cole visited the Paris Exhibition-a comparatively parochial affair, limited to French manufacturers-and became keen to try something similar in England, but grander. He persuaded many worthies, including Prince Albert, to get excited about the idea of a great exhibition, and on January 11, 1850, they held their first meeting with a view to opening on May 1 of the following year. This gave them slightly less than fifteen months to design and erect the largest building ever envisioned, attract and install tens of thousands of displays from every quarter of the globe, fit out restaurants and restrooms, employ staff, arrange insurance and police protection, print up handbills, and do a million other things, in a country that wasn't at all convinced it wanted such a costly and disruptive production in the first place. It was a patently unachievable ambition, and for the next several months they patently failed to achieve it. In an open competition, 245 designs for the exhibition hall were submitted. All were rejected as unworkable.
Facing disaster, the committee did what committees in desperate circumstances sometimes do: it commissioned another committee with a better title. The Building Committee of the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations consisted of four men-Matthew Digby Wyatt, Owen Jones, Charles Wild, and the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel-and a single instruction, to come up with a design worthy of the greatest exhibition in history, to begin in ten months, within a constrained and shrunken budget.
Excerpted from At Home by Bill Bryson Copyright © 2010 by Bill Bryson. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
At Home
“Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up,” contends Bill Bryson. The acclaimed author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bryson lives with his family in a quaint Victorian rectory in Norfolk, in the easternmost part of England. The region is tranquil and lightly populated, and the residents go about their lives without much fuss or ceremony. The last event of great significance to occur in Norfolk was when the Romans decamped in A.D. 43. Yet, after a conversation with the county archaeologist, Bryson began to consider how little he knew about his neighborhood, and most of all, his home and the ordinary comforts of life it provided. To remedy this, he decided to journey about his house, going from room to room, to “write a history of the world without leaving home.”
The result of Bryson’s efforts is At Home, a fascinating examination of the place in which we spend much of our time. History, the author maintains, consists mostly of masses of people going about their personal business at home and doing ordinary things. The places and things we take for granted reveal themselves to be little pieces of history when viewed closely. For example, the contents inside the mundane salt and pepper shakers that sit on the kitchen table can be traced back centuries earlier. Around 2800 B.C., the Egyptians used salt as a funeral offering. Pepper was already being used in India in prehistoric times.
Bryson shows how each room in his home, and often its contents, figures into the evolution of private life. The bathroom provides the inspiration for a short history of hygiene, beginning more than 3,500 years ago with the Minoans, who had such civilized comforts as running water and bathtubs. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, bathing was a cherished daily refuge. Moving on to the bedroom, the author discusses sex, death and sleep. Food inside the kitchen cabinets is linked to the vibrant and tumultuous early spice trade. “Houses are amazingly complex repositories,” Bryson writes. “What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world—whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over—eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment—they are all there in your sofas and chest of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes.”
Lively and inquisitive, Bryson turns even the most seemingly isolated or mundane fact into an occasion for a diverting, entertaining exposition. His wit and elegant prose make At Home one of the best books ever written about private life.
Hardcover : 512 pages
Publisher: Doubleday & Co. Inc./Div Random House ( October 05, 2010 )
Item #: 13-165817
ISBN: 9780767919388
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.25 x 0.8inches
Product Weight: 21.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Copyright © Bookspan. Doubleday Book Club® is a registered trademark of Random House. Used under license. Unauthorized use prohibited. All rights reserved.
59607201205ADFL
Card Security Code
The card security code is an added safeguard for your credit/debit card purchases. Depending on the type of card you use, it is either a three- or four-digit number printed on the back or front of your credit/debit card, separate from your credit/debit card number. To make shopping at Doubleday Book Club® even more secure, we require that you enter this number each time you make a credit/debit card purchase. Please note that your security code will not be stored with us even if you have saved your credit/debit card information.
