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Imagine that in the future you can rent time machines just as easily as you can rent a car. Paradoxes are nicely sidestepped, and you even get the handy pamphlet "1001 Fun Ways to kill Hitler". Sounds great, right? Suppose that time machine breaks down. Turns out it's easier to re-invent civilization than it is to fix said machine, and that's what this book purports to do.
This book is chock full of tidbits, like this on buttons. People wore buttons for thousands of years as ornaments. It was only fairly recently someone realized they could hold clothes closed. This is disgraceful and embarrassing. You can do better.
Scalzi's page describes this book much better than I can. Need to know which animals to domesticate? Covered. Foods to cultivate? Covered. Crop rotation? Compass? Non-sucky numbers? Forge? Birth Control? Logic? Chemistry? Steel? check, check, check, check, ...., check.
This is not a textbook, there is no math, and minimal theory on why things work. It's focused on why and how, not "how does it work?".
I got my copy from the library and, after an hour or two, ordered my own copy from Amazon. I'm sure my fellow Soylenters will also love this book.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 22 2018, @01:14PM
Start with the founder of Judaism. This would eliminate jews, which would stop jews taking advantage of non-jews. This would stop Khazars from Khazaria from converting to Judaism when they were threatened with death if they didn't stop their evil ways. This would stop Khazars from invading pure native cultures and mixing them up to produce mongrels and moral decay. This would stop Karl Marx from being an evil satanic jew, and hence jewish-communist filth would not exist. Israeli Khazars would not exist. Regional conflict would not be upgraded to World Wars. And we could all live in peace and prosperity.