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A review by twitchyredpen
How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North
5.0
This book was an absolute delight to read. It's full of things that I didn't know I didn't know (sails are different shapes for a reason!), things I had underestimated the importance of (spinning wheels!), things I never thought about (where does lye come from in the first place, for soap making?), and snarky comments about things that humanity forgot over and over (vitamin C, hello) or took an embarrassingly long time to figure out (wheelbarrows, jeez).
The book is well-ordered and thoroughly indexed and annotated. It includes useful tables, diagrams, and cheat sheets, in addition to flow charts for determining your approximate place in time and on humanity's tech tree.
Other than "How to Leave Notes Into the Future, So Future Time Travelers Can Come Rescue You," I can't think of any one book I'd rather have with me if I were stuck in the past.
(That book possibly doesn't exist/wouldn't be useful because of the whole "this benefits a different version of you" explanation of what happens if you give your past-self lottery numbers, described in the rental time machine FAQ before the "repair manual" begins.)
Included things I would not have thought about including: Timekeeping (low on the tech tree, but vital for science), Trigonometry (same), how to design a not-stupid horse collar, art things like perspective and dyes.
Not-included things that I think would be important: More about hunting and trapping instead of just dismissing it as inferior to agriculture (farming takes time and you're hungry now; you can't domesticate something without catching it first), How To Not Get Joan-Of-Arc'd For All Your Amazing Knowledge, some thoughts about plastic alternatives (He gets on us over fossil fuels, so introducing those millet-based spoons or even less-bad plastics decades earlier wouldn't be out of place)
The book is well-ordered and thoroughly indexed and annotated. It includes useful tables, diagrams, and cheat sheets, in addition to flow charts for determining your approximate place in time and on humanity's tech tree.
Other than "How to Leave Notes Into the Future, So Future Time Travelers Can Come Rescue You," I can't think of any one book I'd rather have with me if I were stuck in the past.
(That book possibly doesn't exist/wouldn't be useful because of the whole "this benefits a different version of you" explanation of what happens if you give your past-self lottery numbers, described in the rental time machine FAQ before the "repair manual" begins.)
Included things I would not have thought about including: Timekeeping (low on the tech tree, but vital for science), Trigonometry (same), how to design a not-stupid horse collar, art things like perspective and dyes.
Not-included things that I think would be important: More about hunting and trapping instead of just dismissing it as inferior to agriculture (farming takes time and you're hungry now; you can't domesticate something without catching it first), How To Not Get Joan-Of-Arc'd For All Your Amazing Knowledge, some thoughts about plastic alternatives (He gets on us over fossil fuels, so introducing those millet-based spoons or even less-bad plastics decades earlier wouldn't be out of place)