At Home: A Short History of Private Life ~Bill Bryson

–published 2010
–Doubleday
–512 pages (452 main text)
–5/5 stars

Books are crafty and clever things. Even when one is exercising economic self-restraint and has taken great pains to eschew dens of iniquity (the local book shops), books have a way of pulling the ol’ snake charmer routine on you, and before you know it you find yourself at home with one, or more, new friends. Such was the case with me on a recent trip north of Kansas City to attend a work-related training. I was innocently listening to NPR when suddenly, without warning (or at least without anything I recognized as a warning), author Bill Bryson was reading to me from, and being interviewed about, his just released book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Even had I not partaken of and enjoyed Bryson’s book, A Walk in the Woods, many years prior, I would not have been able to resist the siren song of this book. It will surprise no one that on my lunch break that day I found the nearest bookstore, Borders, and walked out with this [thankfully 40% off] hardback.

Amazon calls it “an authoritative history of domesticity”.

Publisher’s Weekly says, “Bryson takes readers on a tour of his house, a rural English parsonage, and finds it crammed with 10,000 years of fascinating historical bric-a-brac. Each room becomes a starting point for a free-ranging discussion of rarely noticed but foundational aspects of social life.”

I say, “there is enough fascinating history…not dry history, but history come alive…in At Home that one could use it as a map for a lifetime of marvelous reading or simply devour it gluttonously as I did.”

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