At Home

Starred review from August 9, 2010
Bryson (A Short History of Everything) 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. A visit to the kitchen prompts disquisitions on food adulteration and gluttony; a peek into the bedroom reveals nutty sex nostrums and the horrors of premodern surgery; in the study we find rats and locusts; a stop in the scullery illuminates the put-upon lives of servants. Bryson follows his inquisitiveness wherever it goes, from Darwinian evolution to the invention of the lawnmower, while savoring eccentric characters and untoward events (like Queen Elizabeth I's pilfering of a subject's silverware). There are many guilty pleasures, from Bryson's droll prose—"What really turned the Victorians to bathing, however, was the realization that it could be gloriously punishing"—to the many tantalizing glimpses behind closed doors at aristocratic English country houses. In demonstrating how everything we take for granted, from comfortable furniture to smoke-free air, went from unimaginable luxury to humdrum routine, Bryson shows us how odd and improbable our own lives really are.

August 15, 2010

Bryson (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, 2006, etc.) takes a delightful stroll through the history of domestic life.

Now living in a 19th-century church rectory in Norfolk, England, the author decided to learn about the ordinary things of life by exploring each room in his house. In each, he finds the stories that make up this discursive romp through British and American life of the last 150 years. The hall, a large barn-like space with an open hearth, was once the most important room in the house. Indeed, the smoke-filled hall "was the house" until the introduction of chimneys, which allowed houses to grow upward. In the kitchen, Bryson discusses such matters as canning, refrigeration and the serial plagiarist Isabella Beeton's hugely successful Book of Household Management (1859), which guided homemakers into the 20th century. In the bedroom, the author considers masturbation, syphilis and Victorian advice on how women could avoid arousal by not using their brains excessively. Aspects of other rooms prompt Bryson to relate stories about the spice trade, the rise of cities, Chippendale furniture, the servant class, kerosene, Gilded Age excess, home gardening, epidemics, mousetraps, electricity, arsenic-laced wallpaper, bats, Central Park, fabrics, water cures and the many ways in which people fall down stairs. He traces the derivation of domestic terms, such as ground floor (bare earth floors), the drawing or living room (originally the "withdrawing" room) and boarders (from dining table or "board"); describes the building of homes from Monticello and Mount Vernon to George Washington Vanderbilt's 250-room Biltmore in North Carolina; and offers wonderful anecdotes, including that of Lord Charles Beresford, a famous rake who, confused by weekend crowding at a country house, entered what he thought was his mistress's bedroom, cried "Cock-a-doodle-doo!" and leapt into a bed occupied by the Bishop of Chester and his wife. In a sense, Bryson's book is a history of "getting comfortable slowly," and he notes that flushing toilets were the most popular feature at the Crystal Palace exhibition in 1851.

Informative, readable and great fun.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2010

Popular nonfiction writer Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything), an American-born UK resident, uses his home--a former Victorian parsonage--to explore how the contents of the rooms--in both his and others' dwellings--are reflections of our history. Changes in how we cope with hygiene, sex, death, sleep, amusement, nutrition, and various manufacturing and service trades all leave legacies on the domestic front. Looking at so many aspects of quotidian culture, Bryson understandably risks leaving out some parts, unlike microstudies such as Mark Kurlansky's Salt. Concentrating on the last 150 years of industrial society, thus including those advances showcased at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (the year his house was built), he often wanders back several centuries. The digressions can be overwhelming, especially as the chapters do not provide clear organization. A dedicated wordsmith writing in a colloquial style, Bryson evidently enjoys his musings and trusts that his public will do the same. VERDICT Readers might best use this anecdotally constructed book by dipping into, rather than methodically reading, it. Its eclectic, ambulatory arrangement will delight many but baffle others. Bryson fans will want to read it. With a bibliography listing print sources but no websites and no endnotes. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/10.]--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2010
Bryson, author of A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) and A Walk in the Woods (2009), lives in a Victorian parsonage built in 1851. He uses the old house with its long history and mundane domestic items to explore the evolution of the home. His detailed tour is a seamless meandering from room to room, subject to subject, with fascinating digressions. He touches on how the hall evolved from a grand room, the most important in the house, to just a place to wipe feet and hang hats; how rooms developed based on changing notions of utility and privacy; how the development of the fireplace led to the development of the second floor. He offers historical and cultural origins of the names of rooms and common household items: table, chair, cookware, bedchamber, closet, study. He details how the development of different materialsbricks to make chimneys and coal for fuelchanged housing construction. The chapter on the kitchen prompts a discourse on food contamination, ice and mason jars, cookbooks and measuring utensils. A beautifully written ode to the ordinary and overlooked things of everyday life in the home.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)