It was followed by Neither Here Nor There, an account of his first trip around Europe. In The Lost Continent, Bill Bryson's hilarious first travel book, he chronicled a trip in his mother's Chevy around small town America.
He and his family then moved to New Hampshire in America for a few years, but they have now returned to live in the UK. He lived for many years with his English wife and four children in North Yorkshire. He settled in England in 1977, and worked in journalism until he became a full time writer. William McGuire "Bill" Bryson, OBE, FRS was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951. He covers the wonder and mystery of time and space, the frequently bizarre and often obsessive scientists and the methods they used, and the mind-boggling fact that, somehow, the universe exists and against all odds, life came to be on this wondrous planet we call home.
And he very clearly remembers thinking: “How do they know that?”īill’s storytelling skill makes the “How?” and, just as importantly, the “Who?” of scientific discovery entertaining and accessible for all ages.
The idea of lots of startled cars and people falling off the edge of that sudden cliff (and 4,000 miles is a pretty long way to fall) was what grabbed him in the beginning, but gradually his attention turned to what the picture was trying to teach him: namely that Earth’s interior is made up of several different layers of materials, and at the very centre is a glowing sphere of iron and nickel, as hot as the Sun’s surface, according to the caption. It had an illustration that captivated him–a diagram showing Earth’s interior as it would look if you cut into it with a large knife and removed about a quarter of its bulk. Bill Bryson’s own fascination with science began with a battered old school book he had when he was about ten or eleven years old.
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