I'm going to call this one 3.5 stars, because I'm indecisive by nature. On the one hand, as all Bryson's books I have read, it is replete with delightful tidbits. The breadth is pretty astounding when you take a step back: mousetraps, cemetery ground levels rising, making bootblack, syphilis, grave robbers, telephones and gas lighting, Palladio and the White House, and the list goes on. William Morris poisoned people with his color choices, y'all! The average 19th c. bedding weighed 80 pounds! On the other hand, it gets a little challenging to hold all these alluring loose ends together after meandering through a dozen rooms of the house. I think the logic may have been more obvious to Bryson himself, since he organized the book around his own (no doubt gorgeous) English home. For me, it read like a laundry list of fascinating trivia that might have been better as a series of feature articles than a book.