'At Home': Bill Bryson Constructs A History Of Private Life

A review of Bill Bryson's "At Home: A Short History of Private Life," which follows the author as he takes a stroll around his own house and examines the objects and spaces that have defined private life for the last 150 years. Bryson discusses his book Oct. 11 at Town Hall Seattle.

Full article: 'At Home': Bill Bryson constructs a history of private life

A short History Of Private Life - Times LIVE

Bill Bryson is a comfortably well-known social historian, a reputation which can only be entrenched by his latest offering, At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Bryson uses the medium of his own home in Norfolk to provide an idiosyncratic and irreverent commentary on proto-Victorian mores and morals.

Full review: A short History of Private Life - Times LIVE

Telegraph Review - At Home: A History Of Private Life

If Bill Bryson hadn’t already published a book called A Short History of Nearly Everything, the title would have done just as well for his new one. On the face of it, his subject matter may have narrowed a bit: from the entire universe to everyday life on Earth.

Full Article: At Home: a History of Private Life by Bill Bryson: review - Telegraph

At Home: A Short History Of Private Life

A Note from the author.

Hello.

Early in the course of my research for my new book I learned that houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that 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 in to the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes.

Houses aren't refuges from history, as I hope you are about to discover in At Home. They are where history ends up.

Bill Bryson