In his introduction to A Short History of Nearly Everything, author Bill Bryson describes a childhood experience common to many of us: a brief infatuation with science, with all its potential and possibility. For Bryson, it was inspired by a textbook's cut-away illustration of the interior strata of the Earth, with the molten core at the center. For myself, it was a children's biography of Jacques Cousteau. Excited by the nearly endless prospects of science, the questions that could finally satisfy a child's curiosity, we both reached for more books, and found our budding passions firmly squashed by an impenetrable wall of unfathomable writing. As Bryson writes in his introduction, "there seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting."Bryson wrote A Short History of Nearly Everything as an antidote to the dry-as-dust science tomes that weigh down students' backpacks. It is a layman's love song to science, to its strange history and stranger characters. Published in 2003, it has been become a popular addition to the popular science genre.