The textbook conspiracy

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call away from the frankly interesting.

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson

On the television series Young Sheldon, Sheldon Cooper loves his textbooks and finds them fascinating when they aren't too far beneath him. But this is a comedy, and that's one of the gags. Do you remember any interesting textbooks from your own school days? I don't either.

Well, I take that back. I do recall being enthralled by those lessons on weather in my eighth-grade science book, so much so that I considered becoming a meteorologist for a time.  And my literature classes provided interesting  reading. Not always, of course. We did have to read Henry James. But usually the reading was well above the typical textbook.

I love it that Bill Bryson's memories of boring science textbooks inspired him to write A Short History of Nearly Everything, a science book that is anything but boring. He proves one can present a vast amount of information -- names, dates, scientific terms and all that -- without putting his readers to sleep. He accomplishes this with a breezy style and metaphors that seem to make even difficult concepts understandable. For example, when talking about exploring the ocean bottom in early submersibles with little visibility, he writes, "It's rather as if our firsthand experience of the surface world were based on the work of five guys exploring on garden tractors after dark."

Bryson ridicules scientists who couldn't write well enough to explain their discoveries to others, such as James Hutton, the 18th century geologist, who was "without rival when it came to understanding the mysterious slow processes that shaped the Earth." Yet, he adds, "Nearly every line he penned was an invitation to slumber." Hutton could have written geology textbooks.

So why are textbooks so dull? Partly it's because their authors want to pack them so full of information that they are willing to sacrifice readability for content. Mostly, however, it is probably because textbooks are written by specialists in particular fields, not by professional writers. There are scientists, historians and other academic types who can write very well, but they would rather write best-selling books than textbooks. Textbooks are usually left to the academics who know their stuff but can't explain it very well.

As for Bill Bryson, he is no scientist, just a gifted writer who devoted himself to learning enough about the various sciences and their histories to explain it in an entertaining way. His new book, The Body, is a sequel of sorts. He explains how the human body works in language we can understand.