Bill Bryson rocked my world with A Short History of Nearly Everything, and this one book is somehow even better, maybe because the histories he's telling deal with our most intimate surrounds.
Bryson marches through our houses room by room, answering questions most of us have never even thought to ask. It's a fascinating premise for a book, made even more so by Bryson's conversational writing style*. I stretched out the reading of this book because I didn't want it to end, but found no difficulty picking it up and putting it down and devouring it in little bites. It's like running into a particularly fascinating friend on the bus.
Even better, the information turns out to be so immediately applicable all around you. For example, I read about Henry Dreyfuss and his design of the cradle desk telephone and then that day went to buy stamps and he was featured on the pioneers of industrial design stamps, and I knew why. It was oddly satisfying. Since then I've found lots of other interesting factoids and histories that have been relevant, and I can guarantee that when I read the book again in a year, it will be just as fascinating.
If you're at all curious about the world immediately around you, I cannot recommend this enough.
* For example:
This was the party that Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt attended as an electric light (possibly the only occasion in her life in which she could be described as radiant). (p. 257)
The catalyst was a woman named Jane Webb who had no background in gardening and whose improbable fame was the author of a potboiler in three volumes called The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-second Century, which she publishd anonymously in 1827, when she was just twenty years old. Her description of a steam lawn mower so excited (seriously) the gardening writer John Claudius Loudon that he sought er out for friendship, thinking she was a man. Loudon was even more excited when he discovered that she was a woman and rather swiftly proposed marriage even though he was at that point exactly twice her age. (p. 316-317)
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