Creating society from scratch never seemed so possible!

I always wanted to write this book: a guide to how you could recreate the inventions and progress of society if you had to do it all yourself. But I wouldn't have had the stamina to research it all - and I wouldn't have thought of such an ingenious premise, namely that this is a manual written for when your time machine breaks down and you're stranded in the past. And of course, Ryan North being who he is, he milks this premise for an incredibly high average of about 1 actual out-loud-laugh per page. Read this book to learn things like how to create language, numbers, and logic; how to farm, breed livestock, and treat illnesses; how to tell what past time period you're stranded in based on what kind of dinosaurs, people, or constellations are around; how to develop increasingly interesting technologies like charcoal, kilns, waterwheels, glass, bikes, engines, and airplanes, all literally from scratch; and how to appreciate how embarrassing it is that it took humanity 200,000 years after we showed up - and 12,000 years after we invented farming - to come up with any of this stuff. I now know way more about everything than I did before, and I had a great time learning it. Plus, if some sort of apocalypse or time travel mishap ever puts me in a situation where I have to rebuild civilization and its knowledge from scratch, I'll be in a much better spot.

This is just a delight to read - North gives us a history lesson and a science lesson all in one and he makes it fun...his geeky joy over learning new things is infectious. I'm still not sure I am quite up to inventing EVERYTHING (computers especially) but I now have even more respect for the people who did manage to invent things (apart from the people who decided not to tell people about their idea, hid it for way longer than necessary because they wanted to make allllll the money off it or sued the ass off anyone else who tried to use any variation on it YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE). Read this if you want to learn more about people, processes, or both.

I found the book to be quite enjoyable. It was a fun read, full of interesting facts and a lot of wit. Of course, this isn’t a book that will change your life, but it did give me more appreciation for things in our world we take for granted. The writing itself is great, and the small chapters make it easy to dive in.

I've never had this much fun learning how to do things like domesticate animals and make penicillin.