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Title

• At Home

Author

• Bill Bryson

Publisher

• Knopf

At Home

A Short History of Private Life

Overview

From the publisher

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home.

To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room, to “write a history of the world without leaving home.” The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutrition and the spice trade; and so on, as Bryson shows how each has fig­ured in the evolution of private life. Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.

As Bryson writes, “Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.”