At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson

Full of interesting bits of knowledge and wonderful tangents down rabbit holes and hedges, Bill Bryson's book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life describes the origin of each room and objects in a home along with descriptions of the exterior landscaping. Mr. Bryson uses his Victorian home a way of guiding us through the each part of the house. This includes the indentation on the wall that provided a shelf for the telephone. He follows Alexander Graham Bell's work to engineer and and install the phone network in cities while his lawyer spent time fending off multiple legal challenges to his patent.

Bill Bryson's description of the miserable life of servants in Victorian England does not cause a longing to return to that simpler time prior to the development of laundry detergent when it took hours to wash and dry clothes through a protracted multistage process using chemical recipes and techniques specific to each type of fabric and garment. Lobsters were so plentiful that many servants had agreements that they would only be served it as a meal two times per week.

He provides an inside out tour of the construction of Jefferson's Monticello and Washington's Mount Vernon.  Both of these residences were rescued by societies that restored the buildings to better than they were when in use.  This is especially true in the case of Monticello as this residence was simultaneously decaying while being remodeled and was not completed at the time of Jefferson's death.

A trip to the kitchen and a brief discussion about salt and pepper starts a tour across the globe heading towards the spice islands.  He discusses the many lives lost due to malnutrition on the long ocean voyages to secure the spices. Even after discovering through clear experimentation that citrus fruits prevented scurvy it still to the British Navy more than 50 years to require that sailors drink lime or other citrus beverages on long voyages.

The discussion about stair design centered around the most dangerous location in the house.  Injuries from by people descending the stairs are quite common.  The first steps and the last steps tend to be the most problematic. Athletic individuals fall more as they tend to descend at greater speed often skipping steps.

I found it time well spent listening to this enlightening audiobook.

Bill Bryson - At Home - 5min.

Bill Bryson at the New York State Writers Institute - 38 minutes