At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Amazon.com Price: $11.12 (as of 05/12/2019 13:41 PST- Details)

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Description

In these pages, the beloved Bill Bryson gives us a fascinating history of the modern home, taking us on a room-by-room tour through his own house and using each room to explore the vast history of the domestic artifacts we take without any consideration. As he takes us through the history of our modern comforts, Bryson demonstrates that whatever happens in the world eventually ends up in our home, in the paint, the pipes, the pillows, and every item of furniture. Bryson has probably the most liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and his sheer prose fluency makes At Home one of the vital entertaining books ever written about private life.

Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2010: Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything) turns his attention from science to society in his authoritative history of domesticity, At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Whilst walking through his own home, a former Church of England rectory built in the 19th century, Bryson reconstructs the fascinating history of the household, room by room. With waggish humor and a knack for unearthing the bizarre stories in the back of the seemingly commonplace, he examines how everyday items–things like ice, cookbooks, glass windows, and salt and pepper–transformed the way people lived, and how houses evolved around these new commodities. “Houses are truly quite ordinary things,” Bryson writes, and, luckily for us, he is a author who thrives on oddities. He gracefully draws connections between an eclectic array of events that have affected home life, covering everything from the relationship between cholera outbreaks and modern landscaping, to toxic makeup, highly flammable hoopskirts, and other unexpected hazards of fashion. Fans of Bryson’s trip writing will find plenty to love here; his keen eye for detail and delightfully wry wit emerge in the most unlikely places, making At Home an engrossing journey through history, without ever leaving the house. –Lynette Mong

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