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grizzly.anderson: Bryson likes to wander from one topic to another, and toss in bits of trivia and history. Schott's Miscellany is a fascinating collection of trivia without the attempt to thread it together.
fannyprice: Bryson's discussion of the development of the home from a more open, collaborative space to a warren of special-purpose rooms as the concept of "privacy" became more important dovetails nicely with Lethbridge's discussion of the increasing physical separation between servants and the served in 18th and 19th century British homes.… (more)
grizzly.anderson: What Bryson does for the home, taking it one room at a time and looking at how we got where we are, Mars & Kohlstedt do for cities and infrastructure.
cbl_tn: Both books address some of the same technological advances, such as refrigeration and electricity and artificial light, for a popular audience.
Although I loved his previous book. I liked the information along with the humor.
This book took out the humor and added lots of unnecessary information. This information isn't so bad, it's just I don't care...at all. I don't care at all about this guys' house or how it came about and I definitely don't want to go room by room with him discussing the history of every room - both the room as it stands in history and as it stands as a part of his home.
It feels like a book with no purpose - no plot - other than to fill me with random facts.
There are SO many good books out there - with a message, a plot and great characters. I'd rather just read those. I made it to 165 pages and just can't bring myself to read this and War and Peace at the same time. ( )
Having spotted several glaring inaccuracies as I read, I found it increasingly difficult to believe the facts that were outside my area of familiarity. It’s unfortunate, but a book like this stays afloat on the reader’s trust, and at some point it lost that for me. ( )
Bryson writes beautifully and I found the information here very interesting. I've always been far more interested in social history and the mundane and that great and the grand (and never good at dates). This book fits that bill precisely, it's full of minutiae that engaged me for all that it's quite a big book. I didn't get tired of reading and was in fact surprised to suddenly find I had finished (the bibliography is quite long so I was fooled as the the length of the text). My only complaint is that although I found almost everything Bryson wrote about interesting, I didn't think it made a coherent whole. It went this way and that, and I enjoyed the trip in every direction, but as to his claim that all this has to do with our homes, I don't think so, no more so than everything in history has to do with us and our homes. ( )
“At Home” is baggy, loose-jointed and genial. It moves along at a vigorously restless pace, with the energy of a Labrador retriever off the leash, racing up to each person it encounters, pawing and sniffing and barking at every fragrant thing, plunging into icy waters only to dash off again, invigorated. You do, somehow, maintain forward momentum and eventually get to the end. Bryson is fascinated by everything, and his curiosity is infectious.
Bryson is certainly famous enough to have got away with a far less bulging compendium. Instead, on our behalf, he’s been through those hundreds of books (508 according to the bibliography) some of which even the most assiduous readers among us might never have got around to: Jacques Gelis’s History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern Europe, say, or John A Templer’s The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls and Safer Designs. He’s then extracted their most arresting material and turned the result into a book that, for all its winning randomness, is not just hugely readable but a genuine page-turner — mainly because you can’t wait to see what you’ll find out next.
Some time after we moved into a former Church of England rectory in a village of tranquil anonymity in Norfolk, I had occasion to go up into the attic to look for the source of a slow but mysterious drip.
Chapter I The Year
In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of ground and containing within its airy vastness enough room for four St. Paul's Cathedrals.
Quotations
Jane Loudon published "Gardening for Ladies" in 1841. It was the first book to encourage women of elevated classes to get their hands dirty and even to take on a faint glow of perspiration. It bravely insisted that women could manage gardening independent of male supervision if they simply observed a few sensible precautions - working steadily but not too vigorously, using only light tools, never standing on damp ground because of the unhealthy emanations that would rise up though their skirts.
We are so used to having a lot of comfort in our lives—to being clean, warm, and well fed—that we forget how recent most of that is.
If I had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly.
Not until 1954 was the work complete. Nearly two hundred years after Jefferson started on it, Monticello was finally the house he had intended it to be.
We now come to the most dangerous part of the house—in fact, one of the most hazardous environments anywhere: the stairs.
Private life was completely transformed in the nineteenth century—socially, intellectually, technologically, hygienically, sartorially, sexually, and in almost any other respect that could be made into an adverb.
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