Other editions of book At Home: A Short History of Private Life

From one of our most beloved authors, a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home now richly illustrated with more than three hundred images. National bestseller "At Home" is Bill Bryson s epic chronicle of domestic history. In this handsome new edition, his riveting room-by-room journey of discovery around his house a Victorian parsonage in southern England is enhanced by more than three hundred carefully curated illustrations, the large majority of them in full color. As he did in the hugely successful "A Short History of Nearly Everything: Illustrated Edition," Bryson complements his sparkling prose with striking illustrations selected from a wide array of sources to create a feast for the eyes as well as the mind. He has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive brains on the planet, and he is a master at turning the seemingly mundane into an occasion for the most diverting exposition imaginable. When you ve finished this book, you will see your house and your daily life in a new and revelatory light. In Bill Bryson s hands, the bathroom provides the occasion for the history of hygiene; the bedroom for an account of sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen for a discussion of nutrition and the spice trade. From architecture to electricity, from food preservation to epidemics, from the telephone to the Eiffel Tower, from crinolines to toilets and the brilliant, creative, and often eccentric minds behind them Bryson demonstrates that whatever happens in the world ends up in our houses, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture."

What does history really consist of? Centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - sleeping, eating, having sex, endeavouring to get comfortable. And where did all these normal activities take place? At home. This was the thought that inspired Bill Bryson to start a journey around the rooms of his own house, an 1851 Norfolk rectory, to consider how the ordinary things in life came to be. And what he discovered are surprising connections to anything from the Crystal Palace to the Eiffel Tower, from scurvy to body-snatching, from bedbugs to the Industrial Revolution, and just about everything else that has ever happened, resulting in one of the most entertaining and illuminating books ever written about the history of the way we live, enhanced in this new edition by hundreds of stunning photographs and illustrations.