The B&n Podcast

Our guest today is bestselling writer Bill Bryson, whose books on travel, history and science celebrate our endless curiosity, our drive to discover and understand the mysteries of our world and of the universe itself. Readers followed Bryson's questing intelligence and wry humor in books about explorations like A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail and Notes from a Small Island. With 2003's wildly ambitious A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bryson followed his desire to overcome his dissatisfaction with his own early education in science. The result ranges from the birth of the universe to the evolutionary history of humankind, in under 600 pages.  He's gone on to write about everything from Shakespeare to Jazz Age America, but in his latest book The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bryson returns to a set of mysteries at once everyday and profoundly elemental. It's an exploration of our inner universe in the company of a guide whose fascination about the secrets of the human o