[American] Bill Bryson, author; translated by Yan Weiming and Chen Yong; Jieli Publishing House, 2005.2
I’ve just finished reading A Short History of Nearly Everything. As a popular science book that is both lively and entertaining, it is certainly well worth recommending. The Chinese translation has an impressive lineup of consultants: Xu Zhihong, Gan Zizhao, and He Zuoxiu; and of reviewers: Wu Guosheng, Liu Huajie, and Zhang Butian. Just seeing these familiar names is reason enough to buy a copy. However, both translators are literature scholars and translators from foreign-language institutes, rather than, like many of the translators in the First Push series, people with a scientific background. In the translation, a few scientific terms seem a little different from those I have seen before, but on the whole it is still fairly rigorous. The original author also does not have a deep scientific background; he is a well-known travel writer. The knowledge in the book is quite up to date, containing much new information that had only just become available at the beginning of the 21st century. The range of topics covered is also very broad, from the universe to particles to relativity, quantum theory, chemistry, biology, geology, anthropology, and so on. But none of it goes very deep; it falls far short of the popular works in the relevant fields by scientists such as Thorne, Hawking, Penrose, Bohm, Thomas, Wilson, Davis, and so forth, and in my personal opinion it is also less of a classic than the works of celebrated popular science writers and philosophers of science such as Gribbin and Sagan. Still, as a popular science work that is easy and enjoyable to read, covers a wide range of subjects, and yet remains quite academically rigorous, it is perhaps the best book currently on the market for cultivating an interest in science and a basic scientific literacy.
July 19, 2005
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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