The Knowledge
How to Rebuild our World from Scratch
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The Knowledge
Narrated by:
John Lee
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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John Lee
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By:
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Lewis Dartnell
About this listen
Maybe it was a viral pandemic, or an asteroid strike, or perhaps nuclear war. Whatever the cause, the world as we know it has ended and you and the other survivors must start again. What key knowledge would you need to start rebuilding civilisation from scratch?
Once you’ve scavenged what you can, how do you begin producing the essentials? How do you grow food, generate power, prepare medicines, or get metal out of rocks? Could you avert another Dark Ages or take shortcuts to accelerate redevelopment?
Living in the modern world, we have become disconnected from the basic processes that support our lives, as well as the beautiful fundamentals of science that enable you to relearn things for yourself.
The Knowledge is a journey of discovery, a book which explains everything you need to know about everything. This is a quickstart guide for rebooting civilisation which will transform your understanding of the world – and help you prepare for when it’s no longer here...
http://the-knowledge.org/
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Critic reviews
As the scouts say – be prepared! Say your prayers that you never need this book (Bear Grylls)
A glorious compendium of the knowledge we have lost in the living… This is the most inspiring book I’ve read in a long time (Peter Forbes)
An extraordinary achievement... It is a great read even if civilisation does not collapse. If it does, it will be the sacred text of the new world — Dartnell that world’s first great prophet
The ultimate do-it-yourself guide to ‘rebooting’ human civilization
A terrifically engrossing history of science and technology (Steven Poole)
Impeccably researched and beautifully written, The Knowledge makes me proud of all we humans have achieved - and dismayed at how much we have to lose. You need to read this book (Stephen Baxter)
Dartnell makes the technology and science of everyday life in our civilization fascinating and understandable. This book may or may not save your life but it'll certainly make it more interesting.
This the book we all wish we'd been given at school: The Knowledge that makes everything else make sense
A marvelously astounding work: In one graceful swoop, Lewis Dartnell takes our multi-layered, interconnected modern world, shows how fragile its scaffolding is, and then lays out a how-to guide for starting over from scratch. Imagine Zombieland told by Neil deGrasse Tyson and you'll get some sense of what a delight The Knowledge is to read (Seth Mnookin, New York Times bestselling author of The Panic Virus and associate director of MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing)
A remarkable and panoramic view of how civilization actually works (Roger Highfield of the Science Museum)
This book is useful if civilization collapses, and entertaining if it doesn't. After the cometary impact it may save your life, and if it doesn't at least you'll know why you perished (S. M. Stirling)
Very interesting and well thought out
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My main complaint with the book is that I found much of the chemistry chapters and the later chapters on navigation and measurement tedious.. This might be because I have some background in physics and chemistry. The author also goes into quite painstaking detail, considering that this is a book for a general audience. Regardless, the aforementioned tidbits sustained me here for the most part.
The narration is perfectly good, if a little slow in places.
An interesting book that I found slowed later
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This is such an important way to think
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Some points:
You've got to be in the mood for it as it goes into some detail about scientific and technical processes.
Some reviewers have complained that it's not the book it claims to be, as it's not literally an instructions manual. I think that's a bit like complaining that Douglas Adams's most famous book does not enable you to actually hitch hike across the galaxy.
John Lee's narration is strongly reminiscent of the public information broadcasts from when a nuclear war was looking very likely.
At times it's a little frustrating because I really wanted some diagrams to illustrate the text. A PDF of further reading would be appreciated.
Anyone planning on writing a post apocalyptic novel would be well advised to check this out. It's actually an excellent primer for world building in general.
It gives a real appreciation of humanity's achievements, a real Wow! feeling.
It's largely optimistic, but does not ignore the darker side of human nature.
An appreciation of civilisation
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Fortunately, it seems people more scientifically knowledgeable than me have also contemplated this question. Professor Dartnell has managed to produce a book that would not only be literally priceless in the event we ever were sent back to the stone-age: but which is also (for a book that consists mostly of descriptions of various technologies and scientific processes) amazingly compelling reading. One realizes how many things are taken for granted in our modern world, which required an extraordinary evolution of multiple developments and refinements.
He has obviously given a great deal of thought as to what the key discoveries are, but also understands which technologies will need to laboriously recreated in set-stages, each one laying the groundwork for the next: and which could be "leap-frogged" to get to the end product quickly. (I didn't know for example that you could have made a basic camera in Tudor times if you had only known how)
He also identifies the key bottle-necks that have historical restricted our development, and how we could overcome them. Taking the reader from the day after "the end of the world", right the way through to a couple of centuries later, with each new limitation being addressed in the likely order it would emerge.
If I were king of the world, there would be a copy of this in every house on the planet. Just in case. . . . . .
The narrator is pretty good too. Despite his truly extraordinary rendition of the word "Sarajevo".
Needed to be written, fascinating to read.
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