At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill BrysonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Very entertaining, if meandering and unfocused - this really is all an excuse for Bryson to dump lots of interesting factoids he's discovered.
Bryson's breezy style feels a little at odds with some of the darker history he discusses and there's certainly little criticality - it does all feel like a slew of trivia rather than anything approaching a true history or wider contexts. It's also almost entirely focused on upper/middle classes (so much architecture!), men and extremely Anglo-American centric - essentially nowhere does he consider how the home develops outside of either the UK or USA, and the living conditions of the poor are barely discussed. He does explain this a little by using his own house as the model, but some of the tangents he goes off down feel very far removed from his quirky Norfolk ex-vicarage adode.
Saying that, as an audio-book read in Bryson's own dulcet tones it flew by and was exactly the distraction I needed in the past week.
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