At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Bill Bryson

$28.95, 452 pages. Hardcover.

Bill Bryson’s gift for artfully using the English language is hard to overstate. He introduced us to his style and wit while taking his readers through the humorous and often absurd Walk in the Woods, and most recently gave us his memoir The Life and Times of a Thunderbolt Kid, stopping off in between to show us the organic beauty (and grit) of the English language by examining everything from Shakespeare (The World as Stage) to, well, everything (A Short History of Nearly Everything). At Home offers, once again, a look into the quirky, brilliant, occasionally eccentric mind of Bill Bryson as he scrutinizes the place we call “home.”

This unconventional history is divided into “rooms,” the starting points for Bryson’s historical investigations. The one element linking these rooms together is the house Bryson and his family inhabit: a Victorian parsonage in pastoral England. The book, while clearly devised for a British audience, is not any less interesting for American readers with even a passing interest in our fellow English-speakers across the Atlantic. The first several rooms are lovingly described and circumnavigated, and since a chronological approach is inconsistent with his architecture-focused novel-structure, he gleefully brings readers back to the historical characters who made lasting impressions in our home-lives as he himself encounters them again and again across his exploration of his home-history.

The full weight of the book (over 400 pages in a large trade quality paperback!) will be of boundless interest to those whose professions, hobbies, or curiosities are touched on: architecture, fashion, geology, superstition, etymology and a great deal of other unusual historical avenues all serve as windows into the history of the home.

Unfortunately, the book ends with more of a whimper than a bang; Bryson’s normal befuddled optimism and unseen smirking is somewhat besmirched by his incomplete and politically motivated last chapter. Fans of history and the English language will be most pleased by this epic journey through the home, but anyone who has ever wondered about why hard-wood floors are fashionable one year, and carpet the next, or why appliances have so often been that shiny porcelain white, or why we’re so careful to keep our lawns trimmed and green, will find At Home an exciting, sometimes jarring, always dynamic romp through our collective heritage of home.

Of interest to Western New Yorkers will be the many mentions of men like Frederick Law Olmsted and Governor DeWitt Clinton, who shaped the urban and private landscapes of America in surprisingly lasting ways. Olmsted himself was responsible for much of the Buffalo City Park System, and Clinton is greatly responsible for the Erie Canal (a.k.a. “Clinton’s Ditch” or “Clinton’s Folly”) but many others influential to New York’s identity make notable appearances.

Outside of its occasional problems with continuity and an ill-defined boundary between rooms as the structural source for chapter divisions, Bryson continues to delight English-speakers (and readers!) with this long, and loving look at the origins and future of “home.”

Overall Score 7.5/10*

Tom Donovan, The Book Nook, 5/27/10

*This review was written from a pre-publication manuscript.
Many editorial and structural changes may be present between the work discussed in this review and the completed book.