Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from there, being nothing at all, to here, being us. Bill Bryson's challenge is to take subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry and particle physics, and see if there isn't some way to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. It's not so much about what we know, as about how we know what we know. How do we know what is in the centre of the Earth, or what a black hole is, or where the continents were 600 million years ago? How did anyone ever figure these things out? On his travels through time and space, he encounters a splendid collection of astonishingly eccentric, competitive, obsessive and foolish scientists, like the painfully shy Henry Cavendish who worked out many conundrums like how much the Earth weighed, but never bothered to tell anybody about many of his findings. In the company of such extraordinary people, Bill Bryson takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.

比尔·布莱森,享誉世界的旅游文学作家。1951年出生于美国艾奥瓦州,毕业于美国德雷克大学。从1973年起,曾在英国居住20年之久,任职于《泰晤士报》与《独立报》,同时也为《纽约时报》、《国家地理杂志》等刊物撰文。后搬回美国,现与妻子和四个小孩居住于新罕布什尔州的汉诺威市。

布莱森擅长用不同的眼光来看待他所游历的世界,在他的书里,英国式的睿智幽默与美国式的搞笑绝妙地融合在了一起。他的尖刻加上他的博学,让他的文字充满了幽默、机敏和智慧,使他自己成为“目前活在世上的最有趣的旅游文学作家”（《泰晤士报》）。

代表作有《哈！小不列颠》、《欧洲在发酵》、《一脚踩进小美国》、《别跟山过不去》、《请问这里是美国吗？》等多种,每本均高居美、英、加畅销书排行榜前列。其中《哈！小不列颠》更被英国读者推选为“最能深刻传达出英国灵魂的作品”。

作者不但才华横溢,兴趣亦十分广泛,在语言学方面著有《麻烦词汇词典》、《母语》、《美式英语》等书,皆为拥有广大拥趸的幽默之作。