At Home
by Bill Bryson · first published 2010
55% recommend45% neutral
Why HN recommends it
A well-researched room-by-room tour of the house, using everyday objects like windows and fixtures to explore history, science and trivia. Light, accessible reading for curious generalists and technology history fans.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
At Home: A Short History of Private Life is a history of domestic life written by Bill Bryson. It was published in May 2010. The book covers topics of the commerce, architecture, technology and geography that have shaped homes into what they are today, told through a series of "tours" through Bryson's Norfolk rectory that quickly digress into the history of each particular room.
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You would love this book: At Home by Bill Bryson (https://www.amazon.com/At-Home-Short-History-Private/dp/0767...) It explores history through the lens of everyday objects in the home (even fixtures like windows, and spaces like your…
on “Spices Have Made, and Unmade, Empires” ↗At Home by Bill Bryson This is not a Sapiens-style retelling of the history of mankind. It's light reading - a quaint look at the history of the modern house, room-by-room, with many diversions into whatever…
on “Ask HN: Which book helped you understand the world?” ↗Currently a chapter away from finishing Bill Bryson's new one, At Home. It is basically the same style and formula of A Short History of Nearly Everything but applied to a walk around his home in England. I am a sucker for a good history of science and technology and Bryson…
on “Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why” ↗The creation of the ice trade is covered in entertaining detail in chapter 4 of Bill Bryson's At Home [1], including a story of how the first speculative shipload to London was held so long by Customs trying to figure out how to tax it, that most of it melted. [1] http://www.amazon.com/At-Home-Short-History-Private/dp/07679...
on “How a Massachusetts man invented the global ice market” ↗…are about travel: Shakespeare: the World as Stage One Summer: America, 1927 The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way Made in America: an Informal History of the English Language in the US At Home: A Short History of Private Life
on “Ask HN: Favorite Nonfiction Books of 2019?” ↗If you want to further develop that gratitude, you might like At Home by Bill Bryson (and everything else he wrote, really)
on “Ask HN: What book changed your life?” ↗The opening chapter of Bill Bryson's wonderful At Home has a bit about the Crystal Palace: > The Crystal Palace was at once the world’s largest building and its lightest, most ethereal one. Today we are used to encountering glass in volume, but to someone…
on “The Life and Death of London's Crystal Palace (2021)” ↗"At Home" by Bill Bryson. "Quiet" by Susan Cain. "Hackers" by Steven Levy.
on “Ask HN: What book have you given as a gift?” ↗Anything by Bill Bryson, but especially “At Home” and “One Summer: America, 1927”. Both are brilliant. “John Adams” by David McCullough. Possibly the best historical bio ever. “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” by Richard Rhodes. The best recounting…
on “Ask HN: Examples of good technical writing?” ↗For an entertaining, yet thoroughly researched account of the history of the home (including the story of arsenic and lead in paints), see Bill Bryson: At Home.
on “Arsenic and Old Tastes Made Victorian Wallpaper Deadly” ↗Can I urge people interested in this to hunt down Bill Bryson reading his own book "At Home" - the first chapter is mostly the crystal palace history and is fascinating
on “The Crystal Palace” ↗…City, a nonfiction book about Mumbai. A good companion to a first time visitor. I believe that an update is coming out soon. Project Hail Mary, a book about space for engineering nerds. The Body and At Home. They're books by Bill Bryson. He geeks out about stuff and showers is with fascinating trivia. It's hard to put his books down. The Right Stuff, a book about how they picked the first astronauts without…
on “Ask HN: Best books read in 2022” ↗…antecedents. Compare maize to teosinte, for instance. Or cultivated potatoes to the wild tubers they were bred from -- the wild ones will kill you, full stop. (As an aside, I highly recommend Bill Bryson's "At Home," which discusses these topics and many more related to how we came to live the lives we do -- it's a great companion to A Short History of Nearly Everything.)
on “Is an All-Meat Diet What Nature Intended?” ↗This type of trivia is why I found Bill Bryson’s “At Home” so entertaining. Tariff on windows? People cover them with bricks. Tariff on glass? Windows made of other materials. Tariff on… well, maybe stop designing tariffs if you can’t predict the outcome!
on “California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy” ↗…jet systems at, what software stack do they use etc. For books... Form, Space, and Order by Francis Ching is a great first purchase. For something light and very accessible, I enjoyed Bill Bryson's At Home, which investigates how the modern home came to be. Really fun. Doesn't really address what we're talking about directly but gives some insight into why you might choose different forms to express different…
on “Why hasn't prefab construction taken over?” ↗