Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything does the same thing.
With the mind of the reader.
Approximately 20 times.
Bryson's book is a tour de force through all possible sciences and their history: fort meteorology, biology, geology, physics, astronomy and so on and so. By Bryson to their findings lurches in each field to the historical developments along, you can watch and see how the different sciences have developed and deployed and to take the most basic knowledge.
The whole thing is absolutely necessary superficial and cursory. Bryson makes a wonderful introduction clearly, in which he describes how he incorporated shortly before going to press, the correction of an expert, he had interviewed: Some inaccuracies and errors had crept from the perspective of the specialists and that was only one interviewee on a topic in a book with dozens of subject and countless interviewees on 600 pages.
But if you know this and accept, relaxes the mind and make it clear that they themselves can and must, if an interested the details of a topic more will be rewarded with an overview presentation that partly a constantly amazed as a child and wonder, even to despair.
What there crunches in mind are the old certainties that break.
Bryson can enthralling and vividly tell and makes the hammer on the knowledge that if he gives a lecture, how empty the universe is actually, then one remembers to have the facts may have heard here and there before but after Bryson chapter is to look for another sky than before. When you read about the extinction waves that have these planets emptied again and gets conveyed simultaneously by what fragile (and incidentally totally untypical) network of special conditions our current survival depends, you will really thoughtful. That we for 99.99% of old have no archaeological finds that we know about Mars more than over the seabed, that the threat of volcanoes and celestial bodies is enormous and not avoidable that our existence from a ridiculously unlikely network of factors is conditioned that we know about the processes inside the earth nothing and so on all the interested reader has taken ever on television, on radio or Germany on the net for information.
But Bryson makes it a clear. Comprehensible. Comprehensible.
And the word that most people think, is age ....
And yet the book in any way is depressing or pessimistic. Bryson brings a wonderful plea for both our fragility and improbability, as well as our complete ignorance positively to interpret: The Gift and the beginning of a great journey on which we have not yet achieved anything practical, but all can achieve if only we properly tackle. It opposes any hubris of the Enlightenment, against any teleological interpretation of evolution and recent civilization and calls for, look to new horizons.
I have I think since Ismael 20 years ago not read a book that moved me so directly so. The crunch in the head has not stopped until now.
And it's a good feeling.
