In At Home, author Bill Bryson offers an anecdote-rich tour of the modern suburban house. For this purpose he uses his own home, an impressive and well-aged English estate. This is a thick book of historical trivia in which Bryson introduces mostly little-known events and figures who share in the responsibility for our modern daily domestic experience. Bryson skips around the centuries (mostly the last four) and hops between Europe (mostly Western) and the Americas (mostly North).Some pages in, I began to suspect Bryson of merely using the house as an excuse to assemble and publish a bunch of disparate historical tidbits he culled and collected along the way; oftentimes a story contributed nothing to our understanding of how the modern suburban house took shape.
But this doesn't make the reading any less agreeable. It's a good gift book, something that might liven up a coffee table in a lasting way.
Notes:
- I wouldn't want Bryson to really give me a tour. Not of his home or of a telephone booth or of anything.
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