A lot of little

Another entertaining short history of other things.

A colleague and I came to blows over this book. It happened like this: I said “Bill Bryson doesn’t know how to write,” and she hit me with her copy of At Home. It isn’t a slim paperback.

As it turns out, we were both right. Bryson writes astonishingly third-rate prose, but he tells terrific stories. It’s a rare sentence that is well composed as well as informative, thus inviting both an “Ah!” of illumination and a chuckle of appreciation. Instead the lines are cluttered with cliches and phrases that no serious writer should use without embarrassment or at least two coats of irony, such as “We know remarkably little”, “the invaders didn’t necessarily swarm”, “comprehensively vague”, “means or spirit”, “deep mystery”, “resist more effectively” and “enjoy benefits” — all from pages 48 and 49, chosen at random.

Any page is a good starting point, because on every page the mad vine of Bryson’s writing unfurls a bud or bloom or breaks into some kind of fruit. Nowhere else are you likely to be told what sperm whales had to do with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Nor how a young engineer named Canvass White invented a hydraulic cement that helped to make America (he did it after walking 2,000 miles along England’s old canals). Or how a provincial gardener named Joseph Paxton came to build the Crystal Palace in London, one of its century’s most amazing buildings.

Full review here Business Standard