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Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words Hardcover – Illustrated, November 24, 2015
Purchase options and add-ons
- food-heating radio boxes (microwaves)
- tall roads (bridges)
- computer buildings (datacenters)
- the shared space house (the International Space Station)
- the other worlds around the sun (the solar system)
- the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates)
- the pieces everything is made of (the periodic table)
- planes with turning wings (helicopters)
- boxes that make clothes smell better (washers and dryers)
- the bags of stuff inside you (cells)
How do these things work? Where do they come from? What would life be like without them? And what would happen if we opened them up, heated them up, cooled them down, pointed them in a different direction, or pressed this button? In Thing Explainer, Munroe gives us the answers to these questions and so many more. Funny, interesting, and always understandable, this book is for anyone—age 5 to 105—who has ever wondered how things work, and why.
- Print length64 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDey Street Books
- Publication dateNovember 24, 2015
- Dimensions9 x 0.59 x 13 inches
- ISBN-100544668251
- ISBN-13978-0544668256
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“Brilliant…a wonderful guide for curious minds.”—Bill Gates “Like any good work of science writing, [Thing Explainer] is equal parts lucid, funny, and startling.’’—NewYorker.com "Clever, intricate" —New York Magazine, The Approval Matrix ("highbrow, brilliant") "Funny, precise and beautifully designed" —The Guardian "...with witty, playful diagrams, you'll be understanding nuclear reactors ('heavy metal power buildings') in no time." —NPR.org, Best Books of 2015 "Whimsical...Munroe’s masterpiece is the antidote to scientific jargon, ably demonstrating that not knowing the exact name for something doesn’t mean you can’t grasp how it works. The same holds for those doing the explaining: you don’t need to use big words to convey meaning. If anything, it just gets in the way." —Gizmodo, Best Science Books of 2015 "Required reading for the curious." —Popular Science "This book is a feast for the eyes and a party for your brain. I cannot more highly recommend that you get this for yourself, your favorite nerd, or someone who just loves beautiful drawings." —Scientific American "One of the charms of this new book is that it imbues everything between its covers with a childlike and unpretentious sense of delight in humanity's intellectual achievements."—Tor.com "[Thing Explainer] soars in both explanatory clarity and entertainment value...Munroe delightfully challenges us to reassess our preconceptions and think of things in new ways." —American Scientist “Munroe’s signature humor and firm grasp on the underlying science and engineering make the book a delightful and informative read.” —Science Magazine "Thing Explainer overall is unintimidating and engaging, with lavish blueprint-like illustrations that draw you into just about every page...Munroe has a gift for turning his own curiosity into your own edification." —CNET "I think a lot of people will have a lot of fun reading this book. Even if you know many big ideas, it is fun to see them get very small. And if you just want to learn about how things work, then the book will show you some big ideas without hitting you with big words too. As an idea for how to write a book, I think Thing Explainer is a good one." —Nerdist PRAISE FOR WHAT IF? "Toreinvigorate your sense of cosmic wonder...breeze through former NASA scientist Munroe's lively answers—peppered with line drawings—to some pretty bizarre questions about life, the universe, and everything else...Extreme astrophysics and indecipherable chemistry have rarely been this clearly explained or this consistently hilarious."—Entertainment Weekly "10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year" "Catchy and approachable...There's plenty of scientific rigor behind his elaborate explanations but he punctuates them with sly humor and winningly primitive cartoon diagrams...A cut above so many popular science and technology books."—NPR.org "Consistently fascinating and entertaining...Munroe leavens the hard science with whimsical touches...An illuminating handbook of methods of reasoning —
From the Back Cover
Have you ever tried to learn more about some incredible thing, only to be frustrated by incomprehensible jargon? Randall Munroe is here to help. In Thing Explainer, he uses line drawings and only the thousand (or, rather, “ten hundred”) most common words to provide simple explanations for some of the most interesting stuff there is, including:
- food-heating radio boxes (microwaves)
- tall roads (bridges)
- computer buildings (datacenters)
- the shared space house (the International Space Station)
- the other worlds around the sun (the solar system)
- the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates)
- the pieces everything is made of (the periodic table)
- planes with turning wings (helicopters)
- boxes that make clothes smell better (washers and dryers)
- the bags of stuff inside you (cells)
About the Author
Randall Munroe is the author of the webcomic xkcd and the New York Times bestsellers What If?, What If? 2, Thing Explainer, and How To. A former NASA roboticist, he left the agency in 2006 to draw comics on the internet full time. The International Astronomical Union has named an asteroid after him; that asteroid, 4942 Munroe, is large enough that it could cause widespread devastation if it were to hit Earth. He lives in Massachusetts.
Product details
- Publisher : Dey Street Books; Annotated edition (November 24, 2015)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 64 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0544668251
- ISBN-13 : 978-0544668256
- Item Weight : 1.76 pounds
- Dimensions : 9 x 0.59 x 13 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #7,797 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Randall Munroe is the creator of the webcomic xkcd and author of xkcd: Volume 0. Randall was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, and grew up outside Richmond, Virginia. After studying physics at Christopher Newport University, he got a job building robots at NASA Langley Research Center. In 2006 he left NASA to draw comics on the internet full time, and has since been nominated for a Hugo Award three times. The International Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid after him: asteroid 4942 Munroe is big enough to cause mass extinction if it ever hits a planet like Earth.
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Top reviews from the United States
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Randall Munroe compiled his own list of the 1000 most common words (presumably in American English) to use as the lexicon to explain a bunch a stuff. The illustrations are wonderful; crisp line drawings that vary in detail from the conceptual (human organs generally as bags) to the highly detailed. In some cases they are complete visual metaphors, presumably because the limitations in available vocabulary led to limitations in the accompanying picture.
This book contains content from my own professional background, so I was delighted to see content pulled from the worlds of naval weapons, space systems and modern information technology. Because of this, I can confirm that even with limited vocabulary, he gets those things explained correctly.
Anybody who has worked as technical writer trying to glean information from subject matter experts for later use in a user guide or other materials designed for non-experts will appreciate what Munroe has done here. Anybody who has ever prepared materials for consumption by elected or appointed government officials will also totally appreciate the challenge he takes on.
Interspersed throughout --in the same simple language-- are short comments that are sometimes insightful, sometimes funny, and they will be instantly familiar to readers of his xkcd web comic.
However, don't read this in one sitting. You might find yourself haunted by this thought: "Randall, you tell us in the intro that eventually you picked your own 1000 words based on a review of multiple lists. The addition (or substitution) of 50 to 100 more could have really taken moved some of the explanations from the highly metaphorical to the more concrete (to his credit, the "things" are "correctly" named in the table of contents).
Great fun for the alpha geeks and curious kids in your life...and just in time for holiday shopping.
Although it can be difficult to explain everything using the most common 10,000 words Munroe does a good job. Some of the explanations are a bit harder to understand, for example, I didn't really get the explanation of the insides of a cell. However, he easily broke down a nuclear power plant and made it really easy to understand.
There is also a bit of humor to this book. Munroe re-wrote the U.S. constitution using these 10,00 words. The results are really interesting and also show that we don't use the number nine enough.
Overall I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in learning about the world or is already a fan of Randall Munroe's other works.
While I enjoyed this book, I found two things that bothered me just slightly. The first thing is that the font in this book is exceedingly tiny. While I have no problems reading it, showing it to my parents proved painful - the font is just so tiny, my mom needed to use a magnifying glass to read. The other thing that bothered me is the over simplification of literally everything in this book. While I don't need to know the exact name of every component in a computer or the name of the tube that brings air to my lungs, it would've been nice to have the exact term should I decided to look up more about it later. Also, simplifying words such as rabbits (long-ear jumpers) and snakes (long biters without arms or legs) is really annoying. My kids had no idea what some terms meant because they are simply too young (Land of the Rising Sun = Japan).
Despite the minor flaws, this book was a lot of fun to go through, particularly with our kids. It's a fun book to get kids interested in looking deeper into how things work, and a great book for parents who are trying to explain how some items work without resorting to saying "I don't know" or "the elves living in the microwave power it".
Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2016
While I enjoyed this book, I found two things that bothered me just slightly. The first thing is that the font in this book is exceedingly tiny. While I have no problems reading it, showing it to my parents proved painful - the font is just so tiny, my mom needed to use a magnifying glass to read. The other thing that bothered me is the over simplification of literally everything in this book. While I don't need to know the exact name of every component in a computer or the name of the tube that brings air to my lungs, it would've been nice to have the exact term should I decided to look up more about it later. Also, simplifying words such as rabbits (long-ear jumpers) and snakes (long biters without arms or legs) is really annoying. My kids had no idea what some terms meant because they are simply too young (Land of the Rising Sun = Japan).
Despite the minor flaws, this book was a lot of fun to go through, particularly with our kids. It's a fun book to get kids interested in looking deeper into how things work, and a great book for parents who are trying to explain how some items work without resorting to saying "I don't know" or "the elves living in the microwave power it".
Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2024
Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2024
Top reviews from other countries
Be aware though, reading this to kids requires a lot of thinking on your part, as you try to translate the small words into their more conventional terms, but you'll have good fun doing so.