The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

 Right from the start of this book, it made me uneasy. I consider myself a technophile: from a young age, I have strived to understand how things work, what makes them tick. I dismantled countless mechanisms, some of which have never worked again, with an inextinguishable thirst for knowledge. This has led me to study electronics, and then physics and chemistry. Unless you say no to everyone, you end up being called on to attend to a lot of practical problems in the line of work I have followed. All to say I had mixed expectations from the book. On one hand, I was looking forward to learning something new (isn't that the case for every "serious" book I start reading?). On the other hand, I was curious to see if some of my preconceptions on the subject would be challenged.

One quick note about context: I finished reading the book this morning, the month of July 2020 is about to end. Covid19 has been the biggest subject on every media for almost six months. I have been thinking about "the end of the world-as-we-know-it" for a few years now, so I have a few ideas about things I consider important.
Back to the book. I admire Lewis Dartnell for taking on this task. Attempting to define the knowledge needed to bootstrap a civilization is no small feast. Doing it in just over 300 pages is challenging. Making it an entertaining read is an awesome feat.
The main problem I have about the book is the two assumptions Lewis Dartnell makes. One stated in the ending chapters: "The economic situation in Britain had the potential to generate enormous profits for the first industrialists, and it was this that provided the incentive to put up large amounts of capital to invest in machinery."
The other assumption remains unspoken (or unwritten?). It is that our world-as-it-is is the best we can achieve. I guess I should have paid more attention to the title: "how to rebuild OUR world", not a better world, not another world, but "our" world. The one presumably that led us to the end of it.
Nowhere does Lewis Dartnell asks whether our societal or political organisations need to be reviewed or changed. Ethical implications of technological (in the broadest sense of the word) choices never appear in the book. We are condemned to retrace the steps that led us to the wiping out of the majority of Earth's population, and just pick up where we left off.
I regret that the curiosity I felt at the beginning of the book turned to frustration, despite a very readable and entertaining style.
Would I keep the book as a reference for the collapse? Nope. The practical application of a lot of the recipes in the book requires more details, some of the basic principles aren't laid out. As the author himself admits in one of the chapters, "the devil is in the details", and whether is comes to repairing what was salvaged, or rebuilding some technology from scratch, the content of this book is just too scant.