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Randall Munroe

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words Hardcover – Illustrated, November 24, 2015

by Randall Munroe (Author)

3,253 ratings

in Computer Hardware & DIY

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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)

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 length

64 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Mariner Books
Publication date

November 24, 2015
Dimensions

9 x 0.59 x 13 inches
ISBN-10

0544668251
ISBN-13

978-0544668256
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“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."—Wall Street Journal

"Education should aim to teach people to reason confidently about problems that they have never come across before. This book is a great deal of fun, and a masterclass in such reasoning. Like all the best lessons, you only realise you’ve learned something once you’ve finished it."—The Economist

"Munroe takes inane, useless and often quite pointless questions asked by real humans (mostly sent to him through his website), and turns them into beautiful expositions on the impossible that illuminate the furthest reaches, almost to the limits, of the modern sciences…The answers are all illustrated with XKCD’s trademark stick figures...and these are eminently approachable." —Newsweek

"What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions includes old favorites, new inquiries and the mix of expert research and accessible wit that has made Munroe a favorite among both geeks and laymen." —TIME

"Loaded with the same dry wit and blank-faced stick figures that populate xkcd, What If? is that rare book that will have you laughing as you learn just how a mass extinction might unfold."—Discover

From the Inside Flap

From the creator of the webcomic xkcd and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller What If?, a series of brilliantlyand simply!annotated blueprints that explain everything from nuclear bombs to ballpoint pens

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)

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 anyoneage 5 to 105who has ever wondered how things work, and why.

From the Back Cover

From the creator of the webcomicxkcdand author of the #1New York TimesbestsellerWhat If?, a series of brilliantly and simply! annotated blueprints that explain everything from nuclear bombs to ballpoint pens

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)

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? InThing 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.
"

About the Author

Randall Munroe is the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers What If? and Thing Explainer, the science question-and-answer blog What If, and the popular webcomic xkcd. A former NASA roboticist, he left the agency in 2006 to draw comics on the Internet full-time, supporting himself through the sale of xkcd t-shirts, prints, posters, and books. He likes candlelight dinners and long walks on the beach. Very long walks. Lots of people say they like long walks on the beach, but then they get out on the beach and after just an hour or two, they say they’re getting tired. Bring a tent. He lives in Massachusetts.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books; Annotated edition (November 24, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 64 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0544668251
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0544668256
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.8 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9 x 0.59 x 13 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,717 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Scientific Instruments (Books)
- #1 in Computer Hardware & DIY
- #2 in Physics of Mechanics

Customer Reviews:
3,253 ratings

About the author

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Randall Munroe

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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.

Customer reviews

5 star		76%
4 star		12%
3 star		5%
2 star		3%
1 star		4%

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Top reviews from the United States

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B. P. Lyman

DON'T BUY THIS BOOK

Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2019

Verified Purchase

Please read the other 1-star reviews before buying this book. I bought the book hoping it would help my kids learn about complicated things explained in ways that are easy to understand. This book is NOT that.

It's difficult to express how bad this book is. The drawings look informative and they pull you in, but the associated text is infuriatingly difficult to decipher. For example (describing a feature in a cross section of the earth's surface): "This is white stuff, like what we put on food to make it better". JUST SAY SALT! EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT SALT IS!

"Fire Water" on the same picture is oil I guess? I don't know because it's unnecessarily cryptic and I don't care enough to decipher it from context clues.
Just say oil and maybe we'll all learn something.

(Describing volcanoes, I think) "HOT ROCK MOUNTAIN The rocks that get pushed into the Earth get hot and watery, and some of them come up through holes in the rock above them." WT*? Does watery mean melted into lava? Just say lava.

This book would be fun if you want to guess what the author is describing by using simple words like "MOVIE MAKER DEEP GOER" (maybe some kind of submarine?) but I find it exhausting and the least useful book for my kids.

I hope i can return it. Total waste of money and time.

130 people found this helpful

Helpful

Sascha von Meier

Why this book is not stupid at all

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2015

Verified Purchase

This book shows you that understanding how something works and knowing its name are different. In doing so, it makes you consider when and why it's actually important to use a special name for some things, and think harder about what your words are really telling people. The point of this book is not to explain things as well and as quickly as possible. It's to help you use your thinking bag in a different way than you do every day. That's why it's so much fun to read.
I'm a teacher at a school for people who already know a lot, and who are very good at what they do. (I teach them about power for our lights and machines.) We use big words and special names all the time. But I sometimes ask my students to try explaining complicated stuff using only simple words, because when you do that, you find out whether you really understand it. It forces you to ask, what is the most important idea here? I wish more teachers did this.
Putting ideas into simple words can also help you recognize how different words carry meaning other than just telling you what something is. This is especially true for things that people often have strong feelings about, like the laws of the land, or our body parts for making new people, or machines for burning cities. Special words can quietly suggest if something is a good or a bad idea, or cover up bad feelings. Playing the game of using only simple words can help you see things more clearly for what they actually are, and say just what you mean. So, this book shows us a way to pay special attention to how our own thinking bag works. And I think that's really, really cool.

626 people found this helpful

Helpful

Benjamin M. Weilert

A unique concept to bring advanced technological knowledge to everyone.

Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2017

Verified Purchase

Growing up in the 1990’s, one of the defining books that helped me understand the world around me was David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work . Using “cartoonish” drawings of plenty of everyday (and not so everyday) machines, I gained plenty of useful knowledge that probably led me to eventually earn my Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2009. While Macaulay’s illustrations were straight forward enough that they didn’t need explanations, some concepts around today certainly need some words to help gain an understanding of the way things work.

Enter Randall Munroe, famed “xkcd” webcomic author and an all around smart guy. In late 2012, he published a comic that described each of the systems in NASA’s Saturn V rocket with simple words. Described as “U.S. Space Team’s Up Goer Five,” the concept of using shorter, more common words to explain complicated concepts came to its full fruition in Thing Explainer. Using the thousand most common words, Munroe manages to humorously and thoroughly explain such “things” as the U.S. Constitution, The International Space Station, and the Large Hadron Collider (amongst many other common and complicated ideas).

While the concept is fun and this book could easily be used to help children understand these fascinating ideas, the thousand-word constraint is also its biggest weakness. Sure, I could deduce that “shafts” were usually “sticks” (or “hallways” if they were like mine shafts), and “fire water” often meant gasoline (or some other combustible fuel). However, I often found myself trying to figure out what the actual name of the item or part in question was because the “simple” name wasn’t self-explanatory. Also, it was sometimes a challenge to read all the small text, as it usually wasn’t arranged in a linear format, instead appearing in chunks around the illustrations to be close to the parts that were being described.

A unique concept to bring advanced technological knowledge to everyone, I give Thing Explainer 4.0 stars out of 5.

41 people found this helpful

Helpful

ren0901

Buy a physical copy, not the Kindle version...

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2015

Verified Purchase

...because the details of the diagrams do not translate well to the smaller Kindle. You'll need all 13 x 9 inches to understand and appreciate the illustrations and explanations.

295 people found this helpful

Helpful

James SV

Great read for kids; adults beware!

Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2018

Verified Purchase

Randall Munroe's earlier book "What If..." was a really, really, good read which gave me the impression that this one would just as good. However, I think this book was the author's personal exercise at word wizardry using "common" words which, at times, made the book cumbersome to read or comprehend. The one thing that the author hasn't lost is his acute sense of humor -- very engaging. I hope he'd consider rewriting this book with "regular" words such as "Atomic Bombs" instead of "Machine for Burning Cities".

Finally, bear in mind, all that jazz above is from this adult's point of the view. My 13 year old, on the other hand, found it extremely funny and engaging and actually remarked that "This guy really knows how to explain things!" (No kidding!)

Final Score: Randall - Texan Hawk, 1-0.

24 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Peter Fitzgerald

Must read for young aspiring Scientists!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 15, 2019

Verified Purchase

I'm a High School Physics teacher, before you buy this book realise that the author uses the 1000 most common words to describe difficult scientific objects/concepts. This is why i love it, my job is literally explaining difficult concepts in an many possible ways and in as simple as possible language. The illustrations are fantastic and carefully constructed so as to include as much detail as possible. I have a very inquisitive 6 year old and he adores this book., it creates hours of fun/discussion showing him how a things from a Car Engine to a Dishwasher works. I often now use some of these descriptions in the classroom and you can see some of the kids eyes react to the funny terminology such as "Blood Pusher" for the Human Heart or Space Boat for a "Rocket"..... So far i have bought 10 copies which i routinely give out as prizes for various science competitions/projects in school, also this is my first time writing a review as i feel i must for this particular book.
If you have an inquisitive child who asks questions about things from Black Holes to Human Cells or wonders which country has the most trees to where did the Dinosaurs go this is an essential addition to your home library..... also if you're a Science teacher please give out prizes like this.

24 people found this helpful

Annie L

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 26, 2017

Verified Purchase

Disappointing book. In some ways as simple things are not given their real names. A battery in a car was called a ‘ power box’ instead of a battery. A helicopter is a ‘sky boat with wings’ ?? Things are explained but this of silly simple terms for well known objects is unnecessary

23 people found this helpful

marie

Because the pages are set up like a comic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 28, 2016

Verified Purchase

This book is not suitable for digital use. Because the pages are set up like a comic, to view the whole page means that the type face is soooo tiny. You could expand tiny parts but that leavs you being very confused with where you are on the page. I paid a hefty price for an unusable book. I need it in paperback!!

26 people found this helpful

Mr Brant

Too much effort has been made to dumb things down

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 12, 2021

Verified Purchase

First off this book was quite a bit bigger than I was expecting - all my own fault, I should have read the description more carefully. Just be warned, this is a coffee table book, not a paperback size!

It's a clever idea, to explain things simply, but I find that the language that is used distracts from the 'understanding'. I accept that maybe I'm not the intended audience, but I was suckered in by the 'complex things explained simply' idea. A better description would be 'complex things explained using language a 7 year old would be able to follow', but I suppose that isn't such a catchy subtitle.

A great idea, brilliant illustrations, but a bit frustrating.

2 people found this helpful

Ashraf Ahmed

Very disappointing book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 29, 2019

Verified Purchase

This is quite possibly the worst book you can buy today. The book fails in that the author refuses to use correct names and terminology and generally treats the reader like new born babies. Avoid the book at all costs.

8 people found this helpful

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