Bill大神的联想能力和知识储备注定了他不会写出一本相对严肃（或者相对轻松？）的专门史通俗读物，这回这本，说来是从1850年代的一所标准英国私人住宅开始介绍的，其实远远超出了作者写作框架的范围，看似是从家庭的门廊，客厅，厨房，佣人房等的顺序介绍每个功能房的来源与发展，实际上，bill大神的联想能力再次不受限制的发挥，你会读到在楼梯上摔伤摔死的统计数据，你会发现砒霜除了用于油漆杀人外，在19世纪还怎么被用来“自杀”和杀人，你会被告知杰斐逊和华盛顿是怎么的在极其繁忙的革命中不停的抽空远程遥控装修随时会被英军放火烧光的自家宅院，你更会因为无数19世纪天才发明家无缘分享自己的发明所带来的巨大进步和创造的巨额财富而唏嘘不已，也会因大英帝国曾经的污染而对今天天朝的现状感到稍许安慰
大神的书虽然厚达600页，但是因为过于有趣，还是不耐读啊，尤其是长途旅行，再好看的藏羚羊群，雅鲁藏布江峡谷彩虹都要被夺去些许光彩的，旅途中途就读完了，还要一直背着的感觉，很不爽呢。
| Kindle电子书价格: | ￥88.36 |
下载免费的 Kindle 阅读软件，即可立即在智能手机、平板电脑或电脑上阅读 Kindle 电子书 - 无需 Kindle 设备。了解更多信息
使用 Kindle 网页版即时在浏览器上阅读。
使用手机摄像头 - 扫描以下代码并下载 Kindle 阅读软件。
![“At Home: A Short History of Private Life (English Edition)”，作者：[Bill Bryson]](https://images-cn.ssl-images-amazon.cn/images/I/416CaNmQM8L._SY346_.jpg)
At Home: A Short History of Private Life (English Edition) Kindle电子书
|
人气
广告
In these pages, the beloved Bill Bryson gives us a fascinating history of the modern home, taking us on a room-by-room tour through his own house and using each room to explore the vast history of the domestic artifacts we take for granted. As he takes us through the history of our modern comforts, Bryson demonstrates that whatever happens in the world eventually ends up in our home, in the paint, the pipes, the pillows, and every item of furniture. Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and his sheer prose fluency makes At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life.
商品描述
名人推荐
From the Author
Early in the course of my research for my new book I learned that houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house.
Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment - they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked in to the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes.
Houses aren't refuges from history, as I hope you are about to discover in At Home. They are where history ends up.--Bill Bryson --此文字指其他 kindle_edition 版本。
Early in the course of my research for my new book I learned that houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house.
Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment - they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked in to the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes.
Houses aren't refuges from history, as I hope you are about to discover in At Home. They are where history ends up.--Bill Bryson --此文字指其他 kindle_edition 版本。
目录
INTRODUCTION
I THE YEAR
II THE SETTING
III THE HALL
IV THE KITCHEN
V THE SCULLERY AND LARDER
VI THE FUSE BOX
VII THE DRAWING ROOM
VIII THE DINING ROOM
IX THE CELLAR
X THE PASSAGE
XI THE STUDY
XII THE GARDEN
XIII THE PLUM ROOM
XIV THE STAIRS
XV THE BEDROOM
XVI THE BATHROOM
XVII THE DRESSING ROOM
XVIII THE NURSERY
XIX THE ATTIC
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX --此文字指其他 kindle_edition 版本。
I THE YEAR
II THE SETTING
III THE HALL
IV THE KITCHEN
V THE SCULLERY AND LARDER
VI THE FUSE BOX
VII THE DRAWING ROOM
VIII THE DINING ROOM
IX THE CELLAR
X THE PASSAGE
XI THE STUDY
XII THE GARDEN
XIII THE PLUM ROOM
XIV THE STAIRS
XV THE BEDROOM
XVI THE BATHROOM
XVII THE DRESSING ROOM
XVIII THE NURSERY
XIX THE ATTIC
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX --此文字指其他 kindle_edition 版本。
文摘
CHAPTER I
THE YEAR
I
In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of ground and containing within its airy vastness enough room for four St. Paul's Cathedrals. For the short time of its existence, it was the biggest building on Earth. Known formally as the Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, it was incontestably magnificent, but all the more so for being so sudden, so startlingly glassy, so gloriously and unexpectedly there. Douglas Jerrold, a columnist for the weekly magazine Punch, dubbed it the Crystal Palace, and the name stuck.
It had taken just five months to build. It was a miracle that it was built at all. Less than a year earlier it had not even existed as an idea. The exhibition for which it was conceived was the dream of a civil servant named Henry Cole, whose other principal claim to history's attention is as the inventor of the Christmas card (as a way of encouraging people to use the new penny post). In 1849, Cole visited the Paris Exhibition-a comparatively parochial affair, limited to French manufacturers-and became keen to try something similar in England, but grander. He persuaded many worthies, including Prince Albert, to get excited about the idea of a great exhibition, and on January 11, 1850, they held their first meeting with a view to opening on May 1 of the following year. This gave them slightly less than fifteen months to design and erect the largest building ever envisioned, attract and install tens of thousands of displays from every quarter of the globe, fit out restaurants and restrooms, employ staff, arrange insurance and police protection, print up handbills, and do a million other things, in a country that wasn't at all convinced it wanted such a costly and disruptive production in the first place. It was a patently unachievable ambition, and for the next several months they patently failed to achieve it. In an open competition, 245 designs for the exhibition hall were submitted. All were rejected as unworkable.
Facing disaster, the committee did what committees in desperate circumstances sometimes do: it commissioned another committee with a better title. The Building Committee of the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations consisted of four men-Matthew Digby Wyatt, Owen Jones, Charles Wild, and the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel-and a single instruction, to come up with a design worthy of the greatest exhibition in history, to begin in ten months, within a constrained and shrunken budget. Of the four committee members, only the youthful Wyatt was a trained architect, and he had not yet actually built anything; at this stage of his career he made his living as a writer. Wild was an engineer whose experience was almost exclusively with boats and bridges. Jones was an interior decorator. Only Brunel had experience with large-scale projects. He was indubitably a genius but an unnerving one, as it nearly always took epic infusions of time and cash to find a point of intersection between his soaring visions and an achievable reality.
The structure the four men came up with now was a thing of unhappy wonder. A vast, low, dark shed of a building, pregnant with gloom, with all the spirit and playfulness of an abattoir, it looked like something designed in a hurry by four people working separately. The cost could scarcely be calculated, but it was almost certainly unbuildable anyway. Construction would require thirty million bricks, and there was no guarantee that such a number could be acquired, much less laid, in time. The whole was to be capped off by Brunel's contribution: an iron dome two hundred feet across-a striking feature, without question, but rather an odd one on a one-story building. No one had ever built such a massive thing of iron before, and Brunel couldn't of course begin to tinker and hoist until there was a building beneath it-and all of this to be undertaken and completed in ten months, for a project intended to stand for less than half a year. Who would take it all down afterward and what would become of its mighty dome and millions of bricks were questions too uncomfortable to consider.
Into this unfolding crisis stepped the calm figure of Joseph Paxton, head gardener of Chatsworth House, principal seat of the Duke of Devonshire (but located in that peculiar English way in Derbyshire). Paxton was a wonder. Born into a poor farming family in Bedfordshire in 1803, he was sent out to work as an apprentice gardener at the age of fourteen; he so distinguished himself that within six years he was running an experimental arboretum at the new and prestigious Horticultural Society (soon to become the Royal Horticultural Society) in West London-a startlingly responsible job for someone who was really still just a boy. There one day he fell into conversation with the Duke of Devonshire, who owned neighboring Chiswick House and rather a lot of the rest of the British Isles-some two hundred thousand acres of productive countryside spread beneath seven great stately homes. The duke took an instant shine to Paxton, not so much, it appears, because Paxton showed any particular genius as because he spoke in a strong, clear voice. The duke was hard of hearing and appreciated clarity of speech. Impulsively, he invited Paxton to be head gardener at Chatsworth. Paxton accepted. He was twenty-two years old.
It was the most improbably wise move any aristocrat has ever made. Paxton leaped into the job with levels of energy and application that simply dazzled. He designed and installed the famous Emperor Fountain, which could send a jet of water 290 feet into the air-a feat of hydraulic engineering that has since been exceeded only once in Europe; built the largest rockery in the country; designed a new estate village; became the world's leading expert on the dahlia; won prizes for producing the country's finest melons, figs, peaches, and nectarines; and created an enormous tropical hothouse, known as the Great Stove, which covered an acre of ground and was so roomy within that Queen Victoria, on a visit in 1843, was able to tour it in a horse-drawn carriage. Through improved estate management, Paxton eliminated £1 million from the duke's debts. With the duke's blessing, he launched and ran two gardening magazines and a national daily newspaper, the Daily News, which was briefly edited by Charles Dickens. He wrote books on gardening, invested so wisely in the shares of railway companies that he was invited onto the boards of three of them, and at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, designed and built the world's first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it. In 1849, the head botanist at Kew sent Paxton a rare and ailing lily, wondering if he could save it. Paxton designed a special hothouse and-you won't be surprised to hear-within three months had the lily flowering.
When he learned that the commissioners of the Great Exhibition were struggling to find a design for their hall, it occurred to him that something like his hothouses might work. While chairing a meeting of a committee of the Midland Railway, he doodled a rough design on a piece of blotting paper and had completed drawings ready for review in two weeks. The design actually broke all the competition rules. It was submitted after the closing date and, for all its glass and iron, it incorporated many combustible materials-acres of wooden flooring, for one thing-which were strictly forbidden. The architectural consultants pointed out, not unreasonably, that Paxton was not a trained architect and had never attempted anything on this scale before. But then, of course, no one had. For that reason, nobody could declare with complete confidence that the scheme would work. Many worried that the building would grow insupportably warm when filled with baking sunshine and jostling crowds. Others feared that the lofty glazing bars would expand in the summer's heat and that giant panes of glass would silently fall out and crash onto the throngs below. The profoundest worry was that the whole frail-looking edifice would simply blow away in a storm.
So the risks were considerable and keenly felt, yet after only a few days of fretful hesitation the commissioners approved Paxton's plan. Nothing-really, absolutely nothing-says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener. Paxton's Crystal Palace required no bricks at all-indeed, no mortar, no cement, no foundations. It was just bolted together and sat on the ground like a tent. This was not merely an ingenious solution to a monumental challenge but also a radical departure from anything that had ever been tried before.
The central virtue of Paxton's airy palace was that it could be prefabricated from standard parts. At its heart was a single component- a cast-iron truss three feet wide and twenty-three feet, three inches long-which could be fitted together with matching trusses to make a frame on which to hang the building's glass-nearly a million square feet of it, or a third of all the glass normally produced in Britain in a year. A special mobile platform was designed that moved along the roof supports, enabling workmen to install eighteen thousand panes of glass a week-a rate of productivity that was, and is, a wonder of efficiency. To deal with the enormous amount of guttering required- some twenty miles in all-Paxton designed a machine, manned by a small team, that could attach two thousand feet of guttering a day-a quantity that would previously have represented a day's work for three hundred men. In every sense the project was a marvel.
Paxton was very lucky in his timing, for just at the moment of the Great Exhibition glass suddenly became available in a way it never had before. Glass had always been a tricky material. It was not particularly easy to mak... --此文字指其他 kindle_edition 版本。
THE YEAR
I
In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres of ground and containing within its airy vastness enough room for four St. Paul's Cathedrals. For the short time of its existence, it was the biggest building on Earth. Known formally as the Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, it was incontestably magnificent, but all the more so for being so sudden, so startlingly glassy, so gloriously and unexpectedly there. Douglas Jerrold, a columnist for the weekly magazine Punch, dubbed it the Crystal Palace, and the name stuck.
It had taken just five months to build. It was a miracle that it was built at all. Less than a year earlier it had not even existed as an idea. The exhibition for which it was conceived was the dream of a civil servant named Henry Cole, whose other principal claim to history's attention is as the inventor of the Christmas card (as a way of encouraging people to use the new penny post). In 1849, Cole visited the Paris Exhibition-a comparatively parochial affair, limited to French manufacturers-and became keen to try something similar in England, but grander. He persuaded many worthies, including Prince Albert, to get excited about the idea of a great exhibition, and on January 11, 1850, they held their first meeting with a view to opening on May 1 of the following year. This gave them slightly less than fifteen months to design and erect the largest building ever envisioned, attract and install tens of thousands of displays from every quarter of the globe, fit out restaurants and restrooms, employ staff, arrange insurance and police protection, print up handbills, and do a million other things, in a country that wasn't at all convinced it wanted such a costly and disruptive production in the first place. It was a patently unachievable ambition, and for the next several months they patently failed to achieve it. In an open competition, 245 designs for the exhibition hall were submitted. All were rejected as unworkable.
Facing disaster, the committee did what committees in desperate circumstances sometimes do: it commissioned another committee with a better title. The Building Committee of the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations consisted of four men-Matthew Digby Wyatt, Owen Jones, Charles Wild, and the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel-and a single instruction, to come up with a design worthy of the greatest exhibition in history, to begin in ten months, within a constrained and shrunken budget. Of the four committee members, only the youthful Wyatt was a trained architect, and he had not yet actually built anything; at this stage of his career he made his living as a writer. Wild was an engineer whose experience was almost exclusively with boats and bridges. Jones was an interior decorator. Only Brunel had experience with large-scale projects. He was indubitably a genius but an unnerving one, as it nearly always took epic infusions of time and cash to find a point of intersection between his soaring visions and an achievable reality.
The structure the four men came up with now was a thing of unhappy wonder. A vast, low, dark shed of a building, pregnant with gloom, with all the spirit and playfulness of an abattoir, it looked like something designed in a hurry by four people working separately. The cost could scarcely be calculated, but it was almost certainly unbuildable anyway. Construction would require thirty million bricks, and there was no guarantee that such a number could be acquired, much less laid, in time. The whole was to be capped off by Brunel's contribution: an iron dome two hundred feet across-a striking feature, without question, but rather an odd one on a one-story building. No one had ever built such a massive thing of iron before, and Brunel couldn't of course begin to tinker and hoist until there was a building beneath it-and all of this to be undertaken and completed in ten months, for a project intended to stand for less than half a year. Who would take it all down afterward and what would become of its mighty dome and millions of bricks were questions too uncomfortable to consider.
Into this unfolding crisis stepped the calm figure of Joseph Paxton, head gardener of Chatsworth House, principal seat of the Duke of Devonshire (but located in that peculiar English way in Derbyshire). Paxton was a wonder. Born into a poor farming family in Bedfordshire in 1803, he was sent out to work as an apprentice gardener at the age of fourteen; he so distinguished himself that within six years he was running an experimental arboretum at the new and prestigious Horticultural Society (soon to become the Royal Horticultural Society) in West London-a startlingly responsible job for someone who was really still just a boy. There one day he fell into conversation with the Duke of Devonshire, who owned neighboring Chiswick House and rather a lot of the rest of the British Isles-some two hundred thousand acres of productive countryside spread beneath seven great stately homes. The duke took an instant shine to Paxton, not so much, it appears, because Paxton showed any particular genius as because he spoke in a strong, clear voice. The duke was hard of hearing and appreciated clarity of speech. Impulsively, he invited Paxton to be head gardener at Chatsworth. Paxton accepted. He was twenty-two years old.
It was the most improbably wise move any aristocrat has ever made. Paxton leaped into the job with levels of energy and application that simply dazzled. He designed and installed the famous Emperor Fountain, which could send a jet of water 290 feet into the air-a feat of hydraulic engineering that has since been exceeded only once in Europe; built the largest rockery in the country; designed a new estate village; became the world's leading expert on the dahlia; won prizes for producing the country's finest melons, figs, peaches, and nectarines; and created an enormous tropical hothouse, known as the Great Stove, which covered an acre of ground and was so roomy within that Queen Victoria, on a visit in 1843, was able to tour it in a horse-drawn carriage. Through improved estate management, Paxton eliminated £1 million from the duke's debts. With the duke's blessing, he launched and ran two gardening magazines and a national daily newspaper, the Daily News, which was briefly edited by Charles Dickens. He wrote books on gardening, invested so wisely in the shares of railway companies that he was invited onto the boards of three of them, and at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, designed and built the world's first municipal park. This park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it. In 1849, the head botanist at Kew sent Paxton a rare and ailing lily, wondering if he could save it. Paxton designed a special hothouse and-you won't be surprised to hear-within three months had the lily flowering.
When he learned that the commissioners of the Great Exhibition were struggling to find a design for their hall, it occurred to him that something like his hothouses might work. While chairing a meeting of a committee of the Midland Railway, he doodled a rough design on a piece of blotting paper and had completed drawings ready for review in two weeks. The design actually broke all the competition rules. It was submitted after the closing date and, for all its glass and iron, it incorporated many combustible materials-acres of wooden flooring, for one thing-which were strictly forbidden. The architectural consultants pointed out, not unreasonably, that Paxton was not a trained architect and had never attempted anything on this scale before. But then, of course, no one had. For that reason, nobody could declare with complete confidence that the scheme would work. Many worried that the building would grow insupportably warm when filled with baking sunshine and jostling crowds. Others feared that the lofty glazing bars would expand in the summer's heat and that giant panes of glass would silently fall out and crash onto the throngs below. The profoundest worry was that the whole frail-looking edifice would simply blow away in a storm.
So the risks were considerable and keenly felt, yet after only a few days of fretful hesitation the commissioners approved Paxton's plan. Nothing-really, absolutely nothing-says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener. Paxton's Crystal Palace required no bricks at all-indeed, no mortar, no cement, no foundations. It was just bolted together and sat on the ground like a tent. This was not merely an ingenious solution to a monumental challenge but also a radical departure from anything that had ever been tried before.
The central virtue of Paxton's airy palace was that it could be prefabricated from standard parts. At its heart was a single component- a cast-iron truss three feet wide and twenty-three feet, three inches long-which could be fitted together with matching trusses to make a frame on which to hang the building's glass-nearly a million square feet of it, or a third of all the glass normally produced in Britain in a year. A special mobile platform was designed that moved along the roof supports, enabling workmen to install eighteen thousand panes of glass a week-a rate of productivity that was, and is, a wonder of efficiency. To deal with the enormous amount of guttering required- some twenty miles in all-Paxton designed a machine, manned by a small team, that could attach two thousand feet of guttering a day-a quantity that would previously have represented a day's work for three hundred men. In every sense the project was a marvel.
Paxton was very lucky in his timing, for just at the moment of the Great Exhibition glass suddenly became available in a way it never had before. Glass had always been a tricky material. It was not particularly easy to mak... --此文字指其他 kindle_edition 版本。
媒体推荐
"Delightful. . . . Bryson's enthusiasm brightens any dull corner. . . . Hand over control and simply enjoy the ride." -"The New York Times Book Review" "An exuberant, shared social history. . . . Told with Bryson's habitual brio. . . . A personal compendium of fascinating facts, suggesting how the history of houses and domesticity has shaped our lives, language, and ideas." -"The New York Review of Books""A treasure trove. . . . Playful, yes, but Bryson is also a deft historian." -"Los Angeles Times""If this book doesn't supply you with five years' worth of dinner conversation, you're not paying attention." -"People" "Bryson is fascinated by everything, and his curiosity is infectious. . . . You can take this class in your pajamas--and, judging by the book's laid-back, comfy tone, I have a sneaking suspicion that Bryson wrote much of it in his." -"New York Times Book Review" "The experience of reading a Bill Bryson book is something you don't wa --此文字指其他 kindle_edition 版本。
作者简介
Bill Bryson's bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods and Down Under. His acclaimed book on the history of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, won the Aventis Prize for Science Books and the Descartes Science Communication Prize. He has written on language in Mother Tongue and Made in America, and his latest bestsellers are Shakespeare and The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. www.billbryson.co.uk. --此文字指其他 kindle_edition 版本。
基本信息
- ASIN : B003F3FJGY
- 出版社 : Anchor (2010年10月5日)
- 出版日期 : 2010年10月5日
- 语言 : 英语
- 文件大小 : 7459 KB
- 标准语音朗读 : 已启用
- X-Ray : 已启用
- 生词提示功能 : 已启用
- 纸书页数 : 594页
- 亚马逊热销商品排名: 商品里排第106,008名Kindle商店 (查看Kindle商店商品销售排行榜)
- 商品里排第3名Home Design（家居设计）
- 商品里排第17名Architecture（建筑）
- 商品里排第194名Engineering & Technology（工程与技术）
- 用户评分:
买家评论
5.0 颗星，最多 5 颗星
5星，共 5 星
1
买家评价
评分是如何计算的？
在计算总星级评分以及按星级确定的百分比时，我们不使用简单的平均值。相反，我们的系统会考虑评论的最新程度以及评论者是否在亚马逊上购买了该商品。系统还会分析评论，验证评论的可信度。
此商品在美国亚马逊上最有用的商品评论
美国亚马逊：
4.5 颗星，最多 5 颗星
1,165 条评论
birddog
5.0 颗星，最多 5 颗星
Bill Bryson is a TREASURE.
2023年2月23日 -
已在美国亚马逊上发表已确认购买
Pure Pleasure
1 个人发现此评论有用
Robin
4.0 颗星，最多 5 颗星
At Home... in England
2010年11月21日 -
已在美国亚马逊上发表已确认购买
As history lesson's go, Bill Bryson's At Home: A Short History of Private Life has a lot going for it. When, after all, is that last time you looked at a fuse box and wondered where it came from? Bryson's thesis, which is that everything you take for granted in your home is the result of a major historical change is right on. I loved reading about the history of lighting, for example, and the reasons why people continued burning candles even after lamps were in common use. Bryson's indepth discussion of pepper debunks a lot of old myths (that pepper was popular mainly because it masked the taste of rotten food) and his interesting explanations of diseases caused by vitamin dificiencies will open a lot of eyes.
But one thing you should know about this book is that it is very, very England-centric. Bryson does explain this when the discusses the wide use of servants (even at the height of servant use they were never as common in the United States) and the effect that America had on the export of ice, but he much of the rest of the time he seems to forget that he's got a pretty big American audience reading the book. While he goes on and on about Mrs. Beaton's housekeeping books for example, he leaves out the influence of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School on cooking in the United States. Particularly tedious to Americans might be the extensive discussion of Great Houses, the assumption that it was almost impossible to do certain things yourself (such as laundry) when in fact Americans were doing these things.
Bryson seems to like areas where Americans were something like the British. He spends a fair amount of time on the Great Houses of the new rich in America at the end of the 19th century, and spends a bit of time on all the intermarrying that went on between Americans and British aristocrats. He seems to think that 500 wealthy Americans marrying British aristocrats in one year was a huge number--which it was for the British. For the Americans it was a drop in the bucket. Most important the lives of these extremely wealthy people are not nearly as interesting as the day to day home lives of average Americans. Unfortunately Bryson doesn't seem to agree.
Bryson's writing on American Great Houses contains one weird error. When discussing the Vanderbilt mansions Bryson describes the way buildings were torn down and says that "By 1947 all had gone. Not one of the family's country houses was lived in for a second generation."
Well maybe not lived in but certainly not destroyed. The Breakers, the most famous of the Vanderbilt country houses can be seen in Newport,RI and hosts thousands of tourists each year.
A great part of American home tradition does come from England. (As the product of two English grandparents) I know that more than most. I just wish that Bryson had specified in the title that he was talking, for the most part, about England. I have a feeling that many European readers may agree with me, not to mention those from Asia and Latin America.
Actually the book made me wish that Bryson would write another book, this one about America and the development of the American home. In the meantime I encourage one and all to dip into a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods for a window into how a Wisconsin family prepared for winter in the late 1870s.
But one thing you should know about this book is that it is very, very England-centric. Bryson does explain this when the discusses the wide use of servants (even at the height of servant use they were never as common in the United States) and the effect that America had on the export of ice, but he much of the rest of the time he seems to forget that he's got a pretty big American audience reading the book. While he goes on and on about Mrs. Beaton's housekeeping books for example, he leaves out the influence of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School on cooking in the United States. Particularly tedious to Americans might be the extensive discussion of Great Houses, the assumption that it was almost impossible to do certain things yourself (such as laundry) when in fact Americans were doing these things.
Bryson seems to like areas where Americans were something like the British. He spends a fair amount of time on the Great Houses of the new rich in America at the end of the 19th century, and spends a bit of time on all the intermarrying that went on between Americans and British aristocrats. He seems to think that 500 wealthy Americans marrying British aristocrats in one year was a huge number--which it was for the British. For the Americans it was a drop in the bucket. Most important the lives of these extremely wealthy people are not nearly as interesting as the day to day home lives of average Americans. Unfortunately Bryson doesn't seem to agree.
Bryson's writing on American Great Houses contains one weird error. When discussing the Vanderbilt mansions Bryson describes the way buildings were torn down and says that "By 1947 all had gone. Not one of the family's country houses was lived in for a second generation."
Well maybe not lived in but certainly not destroyed. The Breakers, the most famous of the Vanderbilt country houses can be seen in Newport,RI and hosts thousands of tourists each year.
A great part of American home tradition does come from England. (As the product of two English grandparents) I know that more than most. I just wish that Bryson had specified in the title that he was talking, for the most part, about England. I have a feeling that many European readers may agree with me, not to mention those from Asia and Latin America.
Actually the book made me wish that Bryson would write another book, this one about America and the development of the American home. In the meantime I encourage one and all to dip into a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods for a window into how a Wisconsin family prepared for winter in the late 1870s.
4 个人发现此评论有用
%2520%25E4%25BD%259C%25E8%2580%2585%2520Bill%2520Bryson%2520%25EF%25BC%258C%25E7%258B%25AC%25E4%25B9%2590%25E4%25B9%2590%25E4%25B8%258D%25E5%25A6%2582%25E4%25BC%2597%25E4%25B9%2590%25E4%25B9%2590%25EF%25BC%2581%25E5%2588%2586%25E4%25BA%25AB%25E7%25BB%2599%25E5%25A4%25A7%25E5%25AE%25B6%25E3%2580%2582%26desc%3D%25E5%25BE%2597%25E6%259D%25A5%25E5%2585%25A8%25E4%25B8%258D%25E8%25B4%25B9%25E5%25B7%25A5%25E5%25A4%25AB~%25E6%2588%2591%25E5%259C%25A8%25E4%25BA%259A%25E9%25A9%25AC%25E9%2580%258AZ.cn%2520%25E6%2589%25BE%25E5%2588%25B0%25E4%25BA%2586%2520At%2520Home%253A%2520A%2520Short%2520History%2520of%2520Private%2520Life%2520(English%2520Edition)%2520%25E4%25BD%259C%25E8%2580%2585%2520Bill%2520Bryson%2520%25EF%25BC%258C%25E7%258B%25AC%25E4%25B9%2590%25E4%25B9%2590%25E4%25B8%258D%25E5%25A6%2582%25E4%25BC%2597%25E4%25B9%2590%25E4%25B9%2590%25EF%25BC%2581%25E5%2588%2586%25E4%25BA%25AB%25E7%25BB%2599%25E5%25A4%25A7%25E5%25AE%25B6%25E3%2580%2582%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.amazon.cn%252Fdp%252FB003F3FJGY%252Fref%253Dcm_sw_r_qq_dp_PS84BDQ9QB00KY2476ZS%26pics%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fimages-cn.ssl-images-amazon.com%252Fimages%252FI%252F416CaNmQM8L.jpg%26site%3DAmazon&token=52B9AEE87ED2EBFFA3DE9F6277D780F6C2274851){kind=link}
%2520%25E4%25BD%259C%25E8%2580%2585%2520Bill%2520Bryson%26title%3D%25E6%2588%2591%25E5%258F%25AA%25E8%25B4%25AD%25E4%25B9%25B0At%2520Home%253A%2520A%2520Short%2520History%2520of%2520Private%2520Life%2520(English%2520Edition)%2520%25E4%25BD%259C%25E8%2580%2585%2520Bill%2520Bryson%26pics%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fimages-cn.ssl-images-amazon.com%252Fimages%252FI%252F416CaNmQM8L.jpg%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.amazon.cn%252Fdp%252FB003F3FJGY%252Fref%253Dcm_sw_r_qz_dp_PS84BDQ9QB00KY2476ZS&token=D1D5F5CBC107E1F680EEDA32F5C04D2B56EBE3B8){kind=link}