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

[fljustice]

From the Introduction:

"...whatever happens in the world--whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over--eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment--they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the fold of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. so the history of household life isn't just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up."


My review:

I'm a big Bryson fan for his quirky style and wide-ranging intellect and, in At Home, he doesn't disappoint. Bryson uses his own home, a Victorian parsonage in a rural part of England, as the touchstone to this work. He takes us from the front hall to the attic in a peripatetic journey through the history of everyday things and the uses of private space. In between he talks about the people who invented gadgets, designed buildings, discovered scientific principals, set sartorial standards, and built sewers; among many, many others. Although the secondary title is A Short History of Private Life, this book ranges through public life, politics, the Industrial Revolution and, most particularly, the Victorian Era.

I felt Bryson made some odd choices in structuring his tale. The most weird (for me) was the discussion of death and burial practices in the chapter on the bedroom. Bryson makes the transition from the development of the bed and bedclothes, to sex, marriage, venereal disease, surgical techniques, anesthesiology, death, mourning and burial. It seemed, to me, the living room or drawing room would have been a better spot, since people were frequently "laid out" in their homes before the recent advent of funeral parlors. And he wrote nothing about the attic in that chapter, in spite of the rich possibilities. Of course, the use of house as a structure for providing disparate chunks of information is an artificial construct. In some ways, the book felt like the left over pieces from Bryson's masterpiece A Short History of Nearly Everything.

In spite of the inherent artificiality, the book is fun, an easy read, constantly surprising and I recommend it. This is more of a history read than research book, but Bryson provides an extensive bibliography (21 pages) and comprehensive index (20 pages) for folks who want to follow up.

The particulars:

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
Published by Doubleday, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1938-8
497 pages

The Table of Contents includes:

I. The Year
II. The Setting
III. The Hall
IV. The Kitchen
V. The Scullery and Larder
VI. The Fuse Box
VII. The Drawing Room
VIII. The Dining Room
IX. The Cellar
X. The Passage
XI. The Study
XII. The Garden
XIII. The Plum Room
XIV. The Stairs
XV. The Bedroom
XVI. The Bathroom
XVII. The Dressing Room
XVIII. The Nursery
XIX. The Attic

[Telynor]

I had a tremendous amount of fun with this book, and it was great reading about the interconnections between people and architecture. I still wonder about that door in the attic...

[fljustice]

[quote=""Telynor""]I had a tremendous amount of fun with this book, and it was great reading about the interconnections between people and architecture. I still wonder about that door in the attic...[/quote]

The door to nowhere...

[Greg]

A Short History of Private Life
Well I must admit that this family are Bryson devotees. We have absolutely everything by this sparkling storyteller. For this work, we got it first in audbile where master Bryson reads his book and I must say it is amazing listening to him. While his choices of lines of investigation are 'diverse' and perhaps peculiar they are never boring.
If I had three thumbs that what I'd hold up for this book
regards Greg