Shakespeare: The World As A Stage: Bill Bryson

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In any case, it would hardly be a unique achievement for someone brought up modestly to excel later in life. A lot of biographies can be bogged down by completely unnecessary information which causes the page number to rise to the thousands. An American expat born in Des Moines, Iowa, a Briton by choice, Bill Bryson is an intentional and perpetual tourist, and it’s a great pleasure to accompany him on his foray into the 16th century.

He does it for America in Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States; for the domestic life in At Home; for the English language in The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. At the outset - if you are looking for a scholarly tome on the life and times of William Shakespeare, you are going to be disappointed. When rebuked by an actor for his thoughtlessness, the nobleman slapped the impertinent fellow and the audience rioted. Bill Bryson's bestselling books include One Summer, A Short History of Nearly Everything, At Home, A Walk in the Woods, Neither Here nor There, Made in America, and The Mother Tongue.

Well that sure is useful, isn’t it, just in case you forget what book you’re reading, and don’t care to look at the cover. Some of them are staggeringly banal ("At the top of the social heap was the monarch") and others are weirdly specific (e. During his time in the US, Bryson decided to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend Stephen Katz (a pseudonym), about which he wrote the book A Walk in the Woods. At the time, scientists assume atoms are solid positively-charged objects studded with smaller negatively-charged components (like raisin buns). Some became coney catchers, or swindlers (a coney was a rabbit reared for the table and thus unsuspectingly tame); others became foists (pickpockets), nips, or nippers (cutpurses), hookers (who snatched desirables through open windows with hooks), abtams (who feigned lunacy to provide a distraction), whipjacks, fingerers, cross biters, cozeners, courtesy men, and many more.

We don’t know, for instance, exactly when he was born or how to spell his name or whether he ever left England or who his best friends were. When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that is of course the hallmark of genius. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures. In the 2015 film adaptation of A Walk in the Woods, Bryson is portrayed by Academy Award winner Robert Redford, and Katz by Nick Nolte.It turns out that electrons act in completely different ways than anything scientists have witnessed in the universe: they appear to jump in space or to appear and disappear at random. Some of the most influential (though often overlooked) fossil hunters of this time include 12-year-old Mary Anning, who carefully excavates and sells “sea monster” fossils in Dorset from 1812 (most are now housed in London’s Natural History Museum). An updated preface includes the recent discoveries of the Cobbe portrait and London's first purpose-built theatre in Shoreditch. Cope and March increase the number of dinosaur species discovered from 9 to 150—including many popular species like brontosaurus and triceratops—through an all-out rivalry that includes sabotaging each other’s digs and stealing each other’s samples. Once again, this new discovery that atoms contain mostly empty space triggers even more questions (say, about why atoms don’t implode), which underscores that the more scientists find out about the world, the less it turns out they actually know.