"A Short History of Nearly Everything": Science book prize won by travel writer

"A book by travel writer Bill Bryson, which explains the origins of everything scooped the Aventis Science Book Prize on Monday night. A Short History of Nearly Everything, was awarded the prize by Lord Robert May, President of the Royal Society and Dirk Oldenburg, chair of the Aventis Foundation, at London's Royal Society. . . .
A Short History of Nearly Everything (Doubleday) is Bryson's journey to explain how we got here. He pursues scientists and persuades them to explain their ideas about the big questions: the origin of the Universe and of life, relativity, the age of the Earth, quantum theory and evolution. A brilliant travelogue about ideas, rather than landscapes, the book took him three years to research and write. He was interviewed about the fascination of getting to grips with science by New Scientist print edition, 31 May 2003:"

Amazon.com editorial:
"From primordial nothingness to this very moment, A Short History of Nearly Everything reports what happened and how humans figured it out. To accomplish this daunting literary task, Bill Bryson uses hundreds of sources, from popular science books to interviews with luminaries in various fields. His aim is to help people like him, who rejected stale school textbooks and dry explanations, to appreciate how we have used science to understand the smallest particles and the unimaginably vast expanses of space. With his distinctive prose style and wit, Bryson succeeds admirably. Though A Short History clocks in at a daunting 500-plus pages and covers the same material as every science book before it, it reads something like a particularly detailed novel (albeit without a plot). Each longish chapter is devoted to a topic like the age of our planet or how cells work, and these chapters are grouped into larger sections such as "The Size of the Earth" and "Life Itself." Bryson chats with experts like Richard Fortey (author of Life and Trilobite) and these interviews are charming. But it's when Bryson dives into some of science's best and most embarrassing fights--Cope vs. Marsh, Conway Morris vs. Gould--that he finds literary gold." --Therese Littleton