At Home: A short history of private life by Bill Bryson

Over its 19 chapters At Home  explores every aspect of private life in Western societies.  It ranges widely in time and space, outlining what we know about the evolution of domestic life from the Neolithic onward.  Along the way it discusses everything from the origins of agriculture to the historical composition of paints to the vagaries of personal hygiene through the ages.

Each chapter uses a room in Bryson's English home as a jumping off point.  Some rooms provide obvious subjects.  "Kitchen" and "Dining Room" deal mostly with food and drink, nutrition, and social habits around consuming food.  Other chapters have a more tenuous connection with their titular room.  "Cellar" mostly deals with building materials, such as concrete, wood, and brick, while "The Passage" is mostly about the telephone, although it begins with a long introduction about the construction of the Eiffel Tower and the excesses of the Gilded Age. 

These kinds of digressions are highly typical, and key to the book's charm.  As At Home progresses you feel that you are being led a wandering path across the landscape of knowledge by a genial guide.  One paragraph leads to another and before you know it, you are learning about the 18th Century Kit Kat Club when you thought you were  here to discuss the concept of comfort, the idea of crop rotation,  the workforce of the Industrial Revolution, or English Country Houses, all of which are discussed in the first 4 pages of "The Drawing Room".

Given the book's scope, you are likely to encounter familiar faces (such as Thomas Edison) and familiar ideas (the discovery of the critical role of Vitamin C in preventing scurvy) as well as much less familiar ones (the idea that Edison's genius largely consisted in his mastery of systems, necessary to roll out electric lighting on a large scale, or the revelation that it was decades after John Snow demonstrated that cholera was spread by bad water before public health officials accepted that 'bad air' was not to blame).

But fundamentally, this is a comfortable book.  You will learn many new things, and unfamiliar perspectives on familiar things.  But you are unlikely to be faced with uncomfortable facts or to be really challenged.  Bryson spends 4 pages discussing tea, but no time at all informing you of the fundamental role of slavery in the transatlantic sugar trade.  He characterizes death duties as 'punishment' of large aristocratic landowners, without discussing the implacable economic and social forces that led to that taxation, and the unprecedentedly egalitarian and democratic society that this dilution of wealth fostered in the 20th Century.

Bryson is writing popular nonfiction for the reading class, which in his implicit understanding is at least upper-middle-class.

This is a warm, idiosyncratic, eclectic, and rambling view of British and American society.  Be prepared to google for pictures of the many grand buildings he mentions, and for more background on some of the many surprising facts he mentions in passing.  But don't expect analysis, and don't expect to be challenged.  At Home is a warm bath, not a cold shower.