How To
On sale
3rd September 2020
Price: £10.99
Randall Munroe is . . .‘Nerd royalty’ Ben Goldacre
‘Totally brilliant’ Tim Harford
‘Laugh-out-loud funny’ Bill Gates
‘Wonderful’ Neil Gaiman
AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The world’s most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the million-selling What If? and Thing Explainer
For any task you might want to do, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It’s full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole.
‘How strange science can fix everyday problems’ New Scientist
‘A brilliant book: clamber in for a wild ride’ Nature
‘Totally brilliant’ Tim Harford
‘Laugh-out-loud funny’ Bill Gates
‘Wonderful’ Neil Gaiman
AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The world’s most entertaining and useless self-help guide, from the brilliant mind behind the wildly popular webcomic xkcd and the million-selling What If? and Thing Explainer
For any task you might want to do, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It’s full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole.
‘How strange science can fix everyday problems’ New Scientist
‘A brilliant book: clamber in for a wild ride’ Nature
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Reviews
An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation
Consistently fascinating and entertaining
Required reading across the world
A great deal of fun
Fascinating
Extremely accurate and often amusing answers to everyday issues
A pure delight, a salty-sweet mixture of hard science and bonkers whimsy
The creator of the popular, extremely excellent webcomic xkcd cleverly illustrates a guide of complicated solutions to simple tasks as common as digging a hole
[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 solutions to life's problems
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
A gleefully nerdy hypothetical instruction book for armchair scientists of all ages
Ridiculous, delightful and, damn it, educational