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

An entertaining read on the history of the modern house. The most interesting insight is that every aspect of the house—every room, every appliance, every material, and everything we think of as “obvious” and “natural” and “normal”—had to be painstakingly invented and figured out. Each chapter of the book focuses on a different room (kitchen, drawing room, dining room, cellar, bathroom, etc) and goes over the history of that room, as well as many amusing anecdotes, facts, and trivia. Some random examples that I jotted down:

• Through most of human history, most houses were extremely dark at night. Few people could afford good candles, and even the best candles still only produce 1/100th the light of a modern light bulb. In fact, the typical refrigerator produces more light than entire households before the advent of electricity.

• The fact that different foods have different nutritional content had to be discovered. In the past, people assumed all food was roughly equivalent: eating a pound of carrots is the same as a pound of cake is the same as a pound of meat. The ideas of nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and all other aspects of nutrition all had to be painstakingly learned (and sometimes at great cost, such as with scurvy).

• The amount of wood we use in construction is astonishing. Small, single-family British homes can easily use 300 trees. A single ship of the line could take 3,000—that’s a small forest!

• The history of hygiene and discovery of the toilet is also intriguing. Before the toilet, cities were, quite literally, covered in human waste. Streets would overflow with it, rivers would be full of it, houses would have it everywhere… I can’t imagine the stench. Best of all, virtually every culture found the hygienic habits of other cultures disgusting: the Brits found the French gross; the French thought the Germans were gross, and so on. Some things never change.

On the one hand, it’s a fun read that gives you a better appreciation for the comfort of homes that
many of us get to enjoy today. On the other, the facts felt fairly disconnected to me, and I forget 99% of what I read mere minutes after reading it, so I didn’t find this a particularly “sticky” book.

Rating: 4 stars