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How To

On sale

3rd September 2019

Price: £10.99

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Selected: ebook / ISBN-13: 9781473680357

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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





Reviews

Science Magazine
[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
Publishers Weekly, starred review
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
Booklist
A gleefully nerdy hypothetical instruction book for armchair scientists of all ages
Sunday Times (Culture)
Ridiculous, delightful and, damn it, educational
Wall Street Journal
Consistently fascinating and entertaining
New York Times
Required reading across the world
The Economist
A great deal of fun
Guardian
Fascinating
Daily Mail
Extremely accurate and often amusing answers to everyday issues
Boing Boing
A pure delight, a salty-sweet mixture of hard science and bonkers whimsy
USA Today
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
Kirkus Reviews
An enjoyable treat for fans of logic puzzles, brain hacking, kaizen, mad science, and other forms of mental stimulation