Read This Book

I have devoured every word of Bill Bryson's travelogues and memoirs, and as you may remember, reading his "A Short History of Nearly Everything" in Kazakhstan provided me many happy hours when not loving up on Owen or singing along with Russian music videos.

And it's a good thing too, because the blurb from his latest book, "At Home" didn't really grab my attention ... "Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to write a history of the world without leaving home". Ho-hum.

But as a devoted fan always looking for a new book, I dutifully added my name to the library's waiting list at #23, and well, waited. Boy I'm glad I did. In only 43 pages, I've learned:

- more than 10,000 years ago, Mesoamericans (the greatest cultivators in history) created maize (corn) ... and we still don't have any idea how they did it. Nothing in the wild resembles corn. Genetic testing proves they somehow developed corn from a plant called teosinthe, which is less than an inch long, has no husk and is almost valueless as food. But the how and why? It's a mystery.

- in 1969 food scientists gathered at the University of Illinois to address this conundrum, but the debates grew so bitter the conference broke up in confusion and no papers were ever published. No similar exploratory conferences have since been attempted.

- corn is the world's first fully engineered plant - one that is wholly dependent on us for survival. Corn kernels do not spontaneously disengage from their cobs, so unless they are stripped and planted, no corn will grow. Had people not been tending to it for these thousands of years, corn would be extinct.

- corn (as starch) is used in the manufacture of soda, chewing gum, ice cream, peanut butter, library paste, ketchup, auto paint, embalming fluid, gun powder, insecticides, deodorants, soap, potato chips, surgical dressings, nail polish, foot powder, salad dressing and several hundred more products.

- when you drive past a field of corn today, every stalk is identical to every other - molecularly identical. In 1970, the corn world suffered a fright when southern corn-leaf blight started killing corn and it was realized that almost all of the national crop was planted from seeds with genetically identical cytoplasm. Had the cytoplasm been directly affected or the disease more virulent, well, our 4th of July picnics would now be missing at least one yummy dish!

Wow, right?!?

What?

No, I am not being sarcastic. I love this kind of stuff!

"At Home" has also taught me that in 1850, a winter storm uncovered a Stone Age village on the shores of the Orkney Islands of Scotland. Evidence shows Skara Brae (as it was named) was inhabited for about six hundred years, but we don't know anything about the people who lived there - where they came from, what language they spoke, or what happened to them.

Oh, and that the Crystal Palace built in London for the Great Exhibition of 1851 was designed by a gardener after 245 designs by architects and engineers were rejected as being unworkable.

And we haven't even made it into the house yet, Bryson is still setting the scene!

So, if you found this post interesting; or secretly want to be a contestant on Jeopardy (or at least win a game of Trivial Pursuit); or are the one in your group known for being a source of um, "useless" info; pick up "At Home" and enjoy. And if you now think I'm a geek, well, please keep that to yourself and hope that the next post is back to Owen.

*Picture was staged, and shot by Owen. I do not normally have free time in the middle of the day to read. I have not been compensated by Bill Bryson or his publisher for this enthusiastic endorsement (but I wouldn't turn down a check).