A Short History of Nearly Everything

"For 3.8 billion years… every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstance to live long enough to do so."
There are things in the universe so small we can't conjure up an adequate mental picture. There are natural processes so immense and immensely complicated we will never be able to wrap our heads around them. But we do have Bill Bryson, whose A Short History of Nearly Everything is probably the most essential and entertaining layperson's science book of our time. And, oh how precious and improbable our time is. As a human being living today, Bryson notes with equal parts wonder and humor, your very existence is owed to a series of unlikely chemical and biological occurrences dating back to the Big Bang, with uncountable fortunate coin flips and near-fatal near-misses attacking your universe, your planet, your evolutionary line at every turn. But don't go looking to high-five the Fates just yet. In his globe-trotting quest from this lab to that telescope, Bryson finds an apocalypse or two may yet be on their way. Asteroids, supernovas, massive earthquakes — the universe that never intended to create us in the first place could wipe us out just as randomly. Our collective scientific knowledge seems to be similarly tenuous, with each discovery being made despite bad math and bickering eggheads. So, how much of this doom and happenstance should make you feel lucky to be breathing, thinking and knowing what you know? Nearly everything. "As far as we can tell," says Bryson, "We are the best there is. We may be all there is."