If you’ve ever wondered how to contain an above-ground pool with just cheese, or how to open many thousands of water bottles at the same time with nuclear weapons in order to fill your pool, this is the audiobook for you. And while the audiobook cannot provide the illustrations that the physical book includes, Wil Wheaton’s friendly and straightforward narration style paired with occasionally exaggerated theatrical moments more than make up for them. Wheaton’s conversational tone creates an excellent juxtaposition with the author’s dry humor and embellished scientific commentary, giving listeners a delightful learning experience that frequently finds them laughing out loud. A truly enjoyable listen that really delivers on its subtitle. A.K.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

★ 06/17/2019

Munroe (Thing Explainer), a former NASA roboticist and creator of the popular webcomic xkcd, offers a witty, educational examination of “unusual approaches to common tasks, and... what would happen to you if you tried them.” Each chapter explores scientific problems with often Rube Goldbergian solutions; in “How to Cross a River,” one could freeze the river, but, due to the second law of thermodynamics, only with a device “fed by a river of gasoline... comparable in size to the river you want to freeze.” To fill a backyard pool, one could siphon H2O from a neighbor living at a higher elevation, buy a ton of bottled water (necessitating industrial plastic shredders to efficiently extract the liquid), or create one’s own water. The text is generously laced with dry humor (“Playing the piano isn’t very hard, in the sense that the keys are all easy to reach and they don’t take very much force to push down”), and Munroe’s comic stick-figure art is an added bonus. But apart from generating laughter, the book also manages to achieve his serious objective: to get his audience thinking “of ideas and then trying to decide whether they’re good or not.” Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Company. (Sept.)

The creator of the popular, extremely excellent and not a little nerdy webcomic ‘xkcd’ cleverly illustrates a guide of complicated solutions to simple tasks, thinking up Rube Goldbergian solutions to tasks as common as digging a hole.” —USA Today

“The mind behind the webcomic xkcd provides a slew of hilariously overcomplicated instructions for everything from throwing a pool party to winning an election, bringing his signature stick figures – and his singular wit – along for the ride. How To is a loving testament to the power of the human brain to take things to absurd lengths.” —Glen Weldon, NPR

“[How To] tackles problems from the mundane—such as how to move to a new house—to those that may trouble a mad scientist building her first lava moat. The solutions are often hilariously, and purposefully, absurd. Embedded in these solutions, however, is solid scientific, engineering, and experimental understanding . . . [for] anyone who appreciates science-based, but Rube Goldberg–esque, solutions to life’s problems.” —Science Magazine

“How To is a pure delight, a salty-sweet mixture of hard science and bonkers whimsy.” —BoingBoing

“A brilliant provocation of a book: clamber in for a wild ride.” —Nature

“A witty, educational examination of ‘unusual approaches to common tasks’ . . . generously laced with dry humor . . . Munroe’s comic stick-figure art is an added bonus. . . .  Apart from generating laughter, the book also manages to achieve his serious objective: to get his audience thinking.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Munroe (creator of the webcomic xkcd; What If?; Thing Explainer) creates another fun series of questions and answers that explore forces, properties, and natural phenomena through pop-culture scenarios . . . With illustrated formulas that humorously explain the science behind Munroe’s conjectures, this book is sure to entertain and educate thinkers from high school on up.” —Library Journal

“How To is a gleefully nerdy hypothetical instruction book for armchair scientists of all ages.” —Booklist

If you’ve ever wondered how to contain an above-ground pool with just cheese, or how to open many thousands of water bottles at the same time with nuclear weapons in order to fill your pool, this is the audiobook for you. And while the audiobook cannot provide the illustrations that the physical book includes, Wil Wheaton’s friendly and straightforward narration style paired with occasionally exaggerated theatrical moments more than make up for them. Wheaton’s conversational tone creates an excellent juxtaposition with the author’s dry humor and embellished scientific commentary, giving listeners a delightful learning experience that frequently finds them laughing out loud. A truly enjoyable listen that really delivers on its subtitle. A.K.R. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

2019-06-17
Former NASA robotics scientist Munroe (Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words, 2015, etc.), the genius behind the xkcd stick-figure webcomic, considers unlikely solutions to common problems.

Say you want to have a pool party. You plan one before realizing that, as Munroe writes, "you can't shake the feeling that you're missing something." What you're missing is a sine qua non: a pool. So you decide whether to build an in-ground pool or an aboveground pool, et voilà—problem solved. But how to get water into it? You can use a giant industrial shredder to grind up huge piles of plastic water bottles, squeezing out enough to fill the pool in a couple of hours but also generating a mountain of plastic waste. You can siphon it from an uphill neighbor's pool using Archimedean principles. You can extract water from the air, as Matt Damon did in The Martian, maybe blowing yourself up in the process. And so forth. Munroe turns to a battery of juicy problems, some beyond improbable. How to jump really high? You can find a very tall mountain, maybe one that's "upwind from where the Olympics are being held," and catch a thermal updraft with a sailplane rig. How to make a friend? Use the principle of physics called the "mean free path," which will instruct you that "if you want to physically run into people, you'll have better luck in a packed football stadium than in the boreal forests of Canada." Of course, a physical collision may earn you an enemy, or someone who avoids you, at any rate. Munroe's madness has its method: His solutions tend to the daft and are definitely outside the box, but figuring out for yourself how to get something done, whether changing a light bulb or powering a house, "can be fun and informative and sometimes leads you to surprising places."

An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation.