Book Review: A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

This is part of the continuing series of random book reviews that'll be nothing like a New York Times book review. Gone is the ten thousand word analysis. Instead, here is a book review like you'd tell your friends.

 The book: Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything

Review:

Question: If Wikipedia and your witty uncle became amorous and somehow had a child, what would it look like?

Answer: This book.

Don't read it if you're a scientist. Don't read it if you have a PhD in anything that involves numbers. Don't read it if you know how to use a graphing calculator with ease. Don't read it if your career choice ends in anything with "-ology." Odds are your britches will get bunched because you think Bryson skips over too much microscopic information that is just too, too, too important to your field of expertise to skip over.

Otherwise, if you always wondered how stuff in the universe works--but never felt like asking your college professor for fear they'd assign you a 20 page research paper on the topic--this is the book for you.