A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

After finishing Into Thin Air, I needed to read something a little less harrowing. Sure, nature can be scary, but there have to be a few great pursuits that anyone with a little free time and a backpack can do, right? I picked up A Walk in the Woods because the premise sounded interesting and because Bill Bryson is a pretty amusing dude. I wasn't disappointed.

A Walk in the Woods follows Bryson and his friend Katz, an overweight, outgoing loudmouth, on their attempt to walk the entirety of the Appalachian Trail. The A.T. is a huge undertaking, 2,100 miles from Georgia to Maine, requiring 6-8 months, lots of food, and some good boots. Bryson and Katz start out as complete amateurs and end feeling like grizzled mountain men.

Although the trail itself was very interesting, some of the anecdotes not directly related were most interesting to me. For example, there's a town somewhere in the States (I can't remember which state and don't have the book handy) where, 80 years ago, a coalfire began underground. The heat caused the ground to begin cracking and collapsing, eventually turning Coalville into a vertual ghost town. The fire is still burning beneath it, and a few hearty souls still live there.

I don't really know what to say about this book. I enjoyed it and it had something of a surprise ending (SPOILER: They quit before the end of the trail), but mostly what I got out of it was an appreciation for nature and for the scale of the United States. Unlike Into Thin Air which probably put me off mountain climbing forever, A Walk in the Woods made me want to take a hike myself. Anyone want to be Katz?

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

It's true, I haven't posted anything in over a month now. But, not to worry dear friends, for I have returned, and with a vengeance. Best watch your back, Chris. There's a new sheriff in town.

As it turns out, Bill Bryson writes more than just great travelogues. A Short History of Nearly Everything is a sort of science primer, giving a brief but thorough introduction to almost every field of popular science. He says that he set out to make scientific knowledge accessible to those people (most of us) who were stuck with completely dull, unreadable textbooks in high school and college. He certainly does a great job putting huge, unapproachable concepts and figures in perfectly understandalbe perspective.

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

Each section gives a history of a certain branch of the scientific world, as well as a brief summary and explanation of its basic tenets. The book moves as chronologically as is possible, while still maintaining clear divisions for the many different “–ologies.” He starts with the Big Bang, age of the Universe, our place in it, and finishes with the evolution of man and a chapter on massive extinctions that are taking place today. In between the book is packed with an unbelievable amount of information – completely readable information – on geology, paleontology, earth science, climatology, evolution, physics, particle physics, of all things, biology, zoology… I could go on. What struck me most was the unseen politics of the scientific world. There have been some serious words exchanged over whether a type of rock belongs to one geological era or the next and personal attacks of character made over fossil classification. Also, Sir Isaac Newton was apparently a complete nutcase. He’s reported to have stuck a nine inch hatpin in between his eye and the socket, pushing it as far back as it would go until it met resistance, just to see what might happen.

Bryson spent years traveling the globe to meet with the authorities (major and minor) in each of these fields, trying to get as much of a handle on each of their areas of expertise as he could before writing this book. What results is a book that has a bibliography with well over 250 entries, not to mention the informal interviews, which is completely and absolutely accessible by someone with no background in scientific education whatsoever. And all this without losing his unique tone and style; it’s still funny, which is quite a feat when your subject matter includes such topics as mitochondrial DNA genetics, carbon and radioactive dating techniques, and tectonic plate theory. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that the book is very dense. It took me weeks to get through it just because there is so much information to absorb – I underlined practically the entire text. But it’s definitely worth the effort. I can’t count how many times I set the book in my lap just to look up and say “wow,” to absolutely no one, or annoyed the hell out of my girlfriend by tapping her on the shoulder and recounting some scientific tidbit that I found fascinating, mostly when she was trying to sleep.

As an environmental studies student who's fascinated by evolution, this is one of my new favorites. I plan to keep it close at hand as a reference from now on. If you don’t care much for any branch of the sciences, this book is probably not for you. If you’d like to get a better understanding of the broad range of scientific information out there, then, by all means, read it.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

A Walk in the Woods is the second of Bill Bryson’s books that I’ve read (the first was Notes from a Small Island), and I think I can now safely call myself a fan of his work. He’s principally a travel writer, but it would be impossible to classify his work so simply. Bill Bryson is a regular renaissance man, and his wide-ranging intelligence shows in his work. A Walk in the Woods is about the eight month long hike that he took along the roughly 2,100 mile Appalachian Trail in 1996. Bryson’s account of his so-called ‘walk through the woods’ would’ve been enough to keep this book at the top of the NY Times bestseller list for so many months, but he rounded out his story with a fairly interesting history of conservation, hiking, the Appalachians and mountain ecology, to name a few.

Bryson has an amazing mind, and his books range over every possible aspect of their subject: history, economics, social effects, ecology, and so on. One thing about Bill Bryson and his work comes to mind before anything else, however: he’s absolutely hilarious. I’m talking laugh out loud, giggle in public funny. I can’t remember how many times I’d start chuckling to myself involuntarily, on the bus, in the back of class, wherever I was. Sometimes I’d read the same line two or three times and just keep laughing.

The most plausible explanation was that any [mountain] lions out there—if [mountain] lions they were—were released pets, bought in haste and later regretted. It would be just my luck, of course, to be savaged by an animal with a flea collar and a medical history. I imagined lying on my back, being extravagantly ravaged, inclining my head slightly to read a dangling silver tag that said: “My name is Mr. Bojangles. If found please call Tanya and Vinny at 924-4667.”

So many of the jokes seem to sneak themselves into the last line of a relatively dry section on botany, or some such thing, which is what makes them work so well. His writing seemed to make me laugh more the further I read into the book; it was as if getting to know his style lets you in on the subtleties and unexpected nature of some of his jokes (perfectly placed in some scholarly section that’s drifting dangerously close to boring). He’s unbelievably intelligent, but he loves to make fun of himself, which is one of the things (besides his wit) that I like best about him. He paints himself as a grinning, bumbling fool, which couldn’t be further from the truth, and loves to recount tales of him whimpering in his tent at the sound of a cracked stick outside. And the best part of reading anything by Bryson is that he’s so good at letting you get to know his characters (namely, himself and a hiking friend) that their slapstick antics get funnier as you learn their personalities better. Reading this book, you might be led to think that Bryson waits for the worst possible situation to strike so that he can write about it and we can laugh about it. I think he just has a great ability to tell stories, and an incredible skill with the English language. Even if you don’t care to learn anything interesting about the Appalachian Trail and its mountains (which, I assure you, you will), you should read this book for its abundance of hearty, smart laughs (as well as chuckles, giggles and big, stupid grins). As with the last of his books I read, I was disappointed to see it end, but he wrapped it up completely perfectly.

(If hiking isn’t your thing, but a road trip around England and Scotland sounds fun, you should read instead Notes from a Small Island, which is easily just as funny and clever as A Walk in the Woods)