The need to know everything

I am standing at the non-fiction shelf at Dubai airport, and notice a curious thing. Three books jumped out at me:

• William Woodruff's A Concise History of the Modern World
• Geoffrey Blainey's A Short History of the World
• Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything

Out of the three, I only tried to read the Bryson one, and gave up after a while as I found it very incoherent, and boring, unlike other Bryson's books.

What is the recent obsession with learning everything about the world, but only in a 400-600 page omnibus version? I understand that a catchy title sells books, but whoever has the chutzpah to think that they can summarize the world in one book in a meaningful way?

***
I finally finished Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Hard to describe how moved I was by this book. And humbled too.

This is a labor of love over a period of over 10 years, and it shows. The amount of insight, the uncovering of the hypocrisy and covert racism, the history of scientific evolution of patient medical records, all of it adds to the story, and does not distract.

In short, Henrietta Lacks was an African American cervical cancer patient whose cancer cells were harvested in 1951 without her knowledge and grown as tissue culture. One part of the story is the scientific development, the other is the story of a poor family trying to keep it together.

Just perfect, is all I can say.