He's at his best suavely setting out mathematical equations for the optimum sizes of staircase risers, treads and goings, explaining the evolution of chimney technology and hymning the well-known achievements in the field of human waste of Messrs Bazalgette and Crapper.īryson asks some promising questions at the outset. This is typical: Bryson's interest in our homes is not in private life at all, but in the appliance of science to domestic interiors.

As a result, we get a long homage to the ingenuity of the Little Nipper mousetrap. One chapter-door opens on to 'the study', which is so dank and chilly that its chief function is not for reading or writing (after reading this tome, I'm still not sure where in the house Bryson writes – he has guarded his privacy with a punctiliousness that, given the subject matter, is borderline improper), but for gathering mouse corpses. The book's nice conceit is a house tour through the Norfolk rectory where Bryson lives, with him as a less pernickety Horace Walpole taking us chapter by chapter from one room to the next. Instead, he takes the easy option, relying on statistics, stories of scientific achievement and stately homes, and his own storytelling gusto. Bryson programmatically evades the titillating paradox of the book's subtitle: the private remains beyond storytelling if it's worth the name. We want to know about those falls that didn't need hospital attention we want to learn about things that are beyond the plodding historian's research capabilities. So the figure for British stair falls quoted above is doubly irrelevant to Bryson's book – it's out of date and quite possibly only a few of those accidents took place at home.Īctually, it's trebly irrelevant: in a book ostensibly about private lives we might have hoped for a sneak peek behind public data. Japan is, in this sense, more like Britain. Rather, it's because Americans are more likely to use lifts and escalators in public environments than anyone else. This is not because Japanese are more reckless than Americans. They, Bryson interestingly points out, are more likely than Americans to be hurt in falls on stairs.

But this, like so much of the diverting material Bryson has compiled here, is irrelevant to what – if you're naive enough to go by the title – this book would appear to be about. Good point: the last compiled figures recorded 306,166 falls requiring hospital attention. Bill Bryson argues this was a nutty economy given the resultant injuries' social cost. I n 2002, the Department for Trade and Industry ceased recording figures for tumbles on stairs.

At home by bill bryson