At Home: A Short History of Private Life »

With a wacky worldview -- and wanderlust -- that garners him comparisons to everyone from Chaucer to Dave Barry, Bill Bryson entertains readers around the world with his travelogues and riffs on the intricacies of language.

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 fig­ured 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 exposi­tion imaginable. His wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life.

The Barnes & Noble Review

The whole book is like this, and you simply have to surrender to it. And that, I am happy to say, is easy enough, for Bryson really is a virtuoso of deft sketches of the enormous, mostly unintended, consequences of alterations in material life. In addition his wit is as engaging as ever, and his appreciation of human foible and earnest nonsense -- from Thomas Edison's concrete piano to the mystery of fish knives -- remains undimmed.

Introduction 1

I The Year 7

II The Setting 28

III The Hall 44

IV The Kitchen 66

V The Scullery And Larder 86

VI The Fuse Box 111

VII The Drawing Room 135

VIII The Dining Room 163

IX The Cellar 191

X The Passage 212

XI The Study 237

XII The Garden 255

XIII The Plum Room 285

XIV The Stairs 307

XV The Bedroom 320

XVI The Bathroom 344

XVII The Dressing Room 374

XVIII The Nursery 403

XIX The Attic 432

Acknowledgments 453

Bibliography 455

Illustration Credits 477

Index 479