From primordial nothingness to this very moment,A Short History of Nearly Everythingreports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplishthis daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, frompopular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields.His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale schooltextbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used scienceto understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expansesof space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeedsadmirably. ThoughA Short Historyclocks in at a daunting500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science bookbefore it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel(albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topiclike the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters aregrouped into larger sections such as "The Size of the Earth" and "LifeItself." Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author ofLifeandTrilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it's when Bryson dives into some of science's best and most embarrassing fights--Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould--that he finds literary gold.