On Bill Bryson's Short History of Private Life

 I just read Bill Bryson's "At Home: A History of Private Life".  Bryson provides a concise history of domestic life by moving through each room of the house and explaining the history of items and concepts related to that room.  (So in the kitchen, you learn about why salt and pepper are our staple spices; in the bathroom, you learn about the history of hygeine and sewage; etc.)  If that description sounds compelling, you will probably love the book; if it sounds dull or hokey, you will probably hate the book.

I fall in the "love it" camp, although I admittedly skimmed some of the chapters in order to get the book back to the library in time.  (This book is probably best read a few chapters at a time, with breaks in between to read other types of books, so that you don't get information overload.)  Here were my favorite parts:

Perspective -- This is my favorite thing to take away from historical non-fiction books, and this book is loaded with facts that provide perspective on where we are now, how we got there, and how it could be different (and almost always, worse).  Perspective can come in a number of forms:

Only loosely related to my "perspective" section, but funny.

• How good we have it now -- We have indoor plumbing, electricity, and appliances that automate our hardest chores.  We have the option to keep our houses comfortably warm in the winter and comfortably cool in the summer.  We have abundant food and clothing, and on top of that, most of us have tons of extra stuff to make our houses more beautiful, personalized, and fun (or sometimes, just more full of boxes).  
• How it's easy to see what doesn't make sense about a different time and place, while it's much harder to see the silliness in your own culture - Bryson describes notable past fashion trends (women wearing their hair in 2 foot poofs that would sometimes catch fire), time intensive and dangerous working schedules (including 4 year olds working as chimney sweeps!), and changed social attitudes on parenting, sex, hygeine (bathing once a year or less?!), and all kinds of other things.  These things seem so obviously non-optimal now - it's interesting to think about what cultural blinders we have to the crazy that's happening in our own time and place.
• How some things are much older than we might imagine - cave men wore shoes that rival modern hiking boots in comfort and grip.  
• While other things are very recent -- forget about being totally up to date - the concept of being "comfortable" in your home is only about 200 years old.  Before that, you couldn't expect to have room temperature warmth, or keep out all the elements perfectly, or have really desirable sleeping and sitting arrangements.  
• How people don't feel jealousy or envy or longing for a thing until they realize it exists -- Even the richest households had to keep themselves entertained by candlelight at night until electricity was invented.  No one minded gathering around the candlelight for knitting, reading, and playing cards, because no one imagined an alternative.  But now that we have electricity, you would be hard pressed to find an American household that ever spends an evening like this, except maybe in a storm or for a designated "turn off technology" night.  

Context --New parents-to-be who research labor and delivery methods will learn about the possibility of home birth.  In support of home birth, you might read the "supporting" fact that the vast majority of babies throughout history and in other cultures are born at home, with the implication that because most people have done childbirth this way, it's the most natural and best way.  The fact that the overwhelming majority of births happened at home is true, but it is significantly contextualized by these statistics:  a woman's odds of dying during one of her childbirths used to be 1 in 8, and 1 in 4 babies died in their first year.  Another labor and delivery procedure that often gets described unfairly:  C-sections.  While it might be true that they get utilized more often than they should (I haven't done any research on this), it's also important to remember that they provide an enormous service.  Before C-sections (and before surgery was a safe option in general), if babies got stuck, women would just continue to labor (sometimes for up to THREE WEEKS) until either the mother or baby gave out.  People didn't do hospital births or C-sections throughout most of history because it wasn't an option, or they couldn't afford it, or because until very, very recently (like when doctors learned about germ theory and anesthesia, which happened less than 200 years ago), there was nothing doctors could do to make things better and a lot they could do to make things worse.  I am so glad that we now have hospitals available, with knowledgeable doctors and modern medicine and much safer options for labor and delivery.  (To be fair, home birth is a lot safer than it used to be as well, thanks to modern medicine -- but this section is intended to be a defense of hospital births.)

Right Person in the Right Place at the Right Time and it Changed the Course of History moments -- If you like this framing of historical events, this book is chock full of those kind of facts.  For example:  a man named Canvass White invented hydraulic cement in the 1820s, which allowed the Erie Canal to be constructed and goods to be shipped efficiently from New York to the rest of the country, which transformed Manhattan from an obscure town of 10,000 to a major economic center of half a million people in less than 50 years.  It also gave America a major advantage over Canada at a time when it was still an open question who would be the economically dominant country in North America.  While I think this type of thing can be overdone (negating the possibility that someone else could've discovered the same thing soon after, or some other clever way to do the thing could have been worked out), it's fun to imagine an alternative world where, were it not for that one person in that one place at that one time, New York City could be a tiny town of no importance, or Canada could be the world power to be reckoned with.