Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything is an great read for people who are interested in Science. It describes in easy to understand terms what the current thinking is in the various sciences including Biology, Geology, Astronomy, Physics, and Chemistry. It reads differently from your science text book in a number of ways. It covers the history of how we got to what we currently think and does so in a “warts and all” approach. It tells you which scientists were brilliant, which were loons and which were just jerks. Of course sometimes this describes the same person, say Sir Isaac Newton. It also describes some of the reaction in science to a new theory, and seldom is that pretty. It also is not afraid to say that many of the “facts” that we learned in school are either now wrong or speculation, sometimes based on a surprisingly small amount of data.
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