How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide For The Stranded Time Traveler

"The brilliant conceit: You’re a time-traveler, and you’ve been issued this hefty, exhaustive handbook to account for any contingency you may experience in your temporal journeying. Should you find yourself stranded in the past, you’ll find a series of chirpy instructions for creating the technology to make your stay more bearable – from planting tea and tobacco (the handbook cautions you that, while it is a mild stimulant, tobacco will eventually be responsible for billions of deaths and will also lead to the invention of vaping) to wildlife domestication and computers. With generous humor, writer Ryan North throws in helpful charts and technology trees and sprinkles useful scientific history among the jokes; the result is a slyly funny piece of popular science writing."