God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake a gruelling hike along the world's longest continuous footpath—The Appalachian Trail.The 2,000-plus-mile trail winds through 14 states, stretching along the east coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive...

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to."And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, a...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLERNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERINTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERA NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICENAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 BY Maclean's • The Washington Post • USA Today • IndigoBill Bryson, bestselling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, takes us on a head-to-toe tour of the marvel that is the human body. As compulsively readable as it is comprehensive, this is Bryson at ...

A fascinating work of what you might call domestic science: our homes, how they work, and the fascinating history of how they got that way.Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as found in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journey...

A wonder-filled quest to understand everything that has happened in the history of the earth, from the Big Bang theory to the rise of civilization and beyond—revised to reflect the last two decades of scientific advancement.How did we get from being nothing at all to where we are today? How did the age of the dinosaurs eventually give way to the age of the iPhone? In this completely revised update to the international phenomenon A Short History of Nearly Everyt...

**THE #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A wonder-filled quest to understand everything that has happened in the history of the earth, from the Big Bang theory to the rise of civilization and beyond.“Brims with strange and amazing facts . . . a modern classic of sciencewriting.” —The New York Times**From the beloved and bestselling author of the hilarious, bittersweet memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid and numerous bestselling travel books, includ...

Bill Bryson’s bestselling and brilliantly witty biography of William Shakespeare takes the reader on an enthralling tour through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship—updated with a new introduction by the author to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s deathWilliam Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arr...

From one of the world's most beloved writers and New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body, a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s.Some say that the first hints that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came from his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across the moth-holed chest was a golden thunderbolt. It may have looked like an old college ...

As usual, Bill Bryson says it best: “English is a merry confusion of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense. This is a language where cleave can mean to cut in half or to hold two halves together; where the simple word set has 126 different meanings as a verb, 58 as a noun, and 10 as a participial adjective; where if you can run fast you are moving swiftly, but if you are stuck fast you are not moving at all; [and] where colonel, freight, on...

Deliciously funny, fact-filled and adventurous, In a Sunburned Country takes us on a grand tour of Australia. It's a place where interesting things happen all the time, from a Prime Minister lost — yes, lost — while swimming at sea, to Japanese cult members who may (entirely unnoticed) have set off an atomic bomb on their 500,000 acre property in the great western desert.Australia is the only island that is also a continent, and the only continent that is also a country. I...

Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and At Home is likely to become the most illuminating book on the way we lived then and live now--the why and the where and the how of it--ever written.Now, in this handsome new edition, his sparkling prose will be enhanced by some 200 carefully curated full-colour images from both the past and the present. Selected from a staggering array of sources to bring Bill's journey to vivid life, these pict...