18 November 2011
Sometimes – well, quite often – when you buy a book which quotes a series of rave reviews from seemingly trustworthy sources, it fails to live up to the heightened expectations. So how pleasant to have just read a book, which in every way justifies all the praise that has been heaped upon it. It is as compulsively readable, accessible, informative (often counter-intuitive), entertaining book as I’ve come across. I found the title not particularly magnetic, indeed a bit off-putting. But you can’t, as they say, judge a book by its cover – though sometimes you certainly can (eg if the personal name – author may be a misleading term – displayed is Katie Price or Jeffrey Archer).
But you’re losing patience, you want to know what this wonderful book is. At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson, was published in 2010, and in a paperback edition in 2011 (£8.99 for 700 pages, so a generous words per pound ratio). Bill Bryson is best known for his best-selling travel books, but he’s also written about the English language and the recent A Short History of Nearly Everything won a couple of prizes, including one for Science Communication.
The book takes the form of essays inspired by different rooms in his house – an 1851 Norfolk rectory. And he tells us how the ordinary things in life have come to be (and the way has usually been quite extraordinary). What does history really consist of – well it’s centuries of people going about their daily business – sleeping, eating, having sex, toileting, endeavouring to get comfortable. And where did all these normal activities take place? At home.
And so you learn about all sort of things that you might not think are connected to any of the other things and to the homes we live in – the Eiffel Tower, bed bugs, body snatching, the history of cement and concrete, spice wars, cotton manufacture, the servant problem, adulteration of food, poisons, Mrs Beeton, the ice trade, stoves, whale oil, electric lights, lots of remarkable and successful and eccentric figures, mad architecture, vitamins, exploration, lawnmowers, rats, gardening for ladies, the science of stairs, dirt, disease, waste, more dirt, more disease, more waste – and truly, much, much more. All of these topics are written about in an informal, but informed way, so that you don’t at all want to skip the bits and the topics you might have thought beforehand you would have been tempted to. There’s over 500 books listed in the bibliography so he’s done his research,
Bryson begins his book, having climbed into his attic for the first time and found a door. “I was surprised to find a secret door, not visible from anywhere outside the house, in an external wall. The door opened easily and led out onto a tiny rooftop space, not much larger than a tabletop, between the front and back gables of the house. Victorian houses are often a collection of architectural bewilderments, but this one was starkly unfathomable: why an architect had troubled to put in a door to a space so lacking in evident need or purpose was beyond explanation, but it did have the magical and unexpected effect of providing the most wonderful view”.
And he describes the view and the thoughts occasioned by it. At the end of the book he returns to the mysterious and magical space and ends the book with these thoughts, which surely justify the inclusion of this volume in our Sustainable Scotland site, if any further justification is required.
One of the things not visible from our rooftop is how much energy and other inputs we require to provide us with the ease and convenience that we have all come to expect in our lives. It’s a lot – a shocking amount. Of the total energy produced on Earth since the Industrial Revolution began, half has been consumed in the last twenty years. Disproportionately it was consumed by us in the rich world; we are an exceptionally privileged fraction.
Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same amount of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American. We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet’s other citizens. One day – and don’t expect it to be a distant day – many of those six billion or so less well off people are bound to demand what we have, and to get it as easily as we got it, and that will require more resources than this planet can easily, or even conceivably, yield.
The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither.
For Bill Bryson see Wikipedia and his own website. Bill Bryson is the biggest-selling non-fiction author in the UK since records began.
You'll like the song. You'll enjoy the performance. It's Roberta Flack and Peabo Bryson: The Closer I Get To You.
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