Starred review from June 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.

July 1, 2019
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.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 1, 2019

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. This professed book of "bad ideas" aims to encourage readers to reach for revolutionary ideas by considering unusual and fun approaches. Calculating how thick a wall of cheese would need to be to support an above-ground pool leads to a discussion of nuclear weapons testing and the engineering disaster that formed California's Salton Sea. There are instructions on how to ski, examine the friction of wax, limits of speed skiing, and the fastest way to make snow. Guest contributors, such as astronaut Chris Hadfield and tennis star Serena Williams, offer expertise on how to hit targets and make emergency landings. VERDICT 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.--Catherine Lantz, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Lib.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2019
Munroe's latest collection of scientific miscellany, after Thing Explainer (2015), is, as he writes in the introduction, a book of bad ideas. To be fair, the ideas are not bad?chapters covering how to jump really high, cross a river, and charge a phone, for example, seem innocuously useful?it's the solutions that manage to push credulity while being completely scientifically sound. Peppered with Munroe's signature stick-figure drawings (well known to fans of his webcomic, xkcd), historical facts, and snarky footnotes, the book uses math and physics to follow the logical progression from how to throw a pool party to how thick a wall of cheese you will need to build a pool adequate for a pool party or, in an interview with astronaut Chris Hadfield, how to make an emergency landing on a ski jump. His boundless curiosity takes a surprisingly emotional turn in How to Make Friends, which quickly goes from the geometry of random collisions to the simple-yet-complicated truth behind human interaction. How To is a gleefully nerdy hypothetical instruction book for armchair scientists of all ages.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2019
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 voil�--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.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.