Description
Book SynopsisFrom the No. 1 bestselling author of What If? - the man who created xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons - comes a series of brilliantly simple diagrams (''blueprints'' if you want to be complicated about it) that show how important things work: from the nuclear bomb to the biro.
It''s good to know what the parts of a thing are called, but it''s much more interesting to know what they do. Richard Feynman once said that if you can''t explain something to a first-year student, you don''t really get it. In Thing Explainer, Randall Munroe takes a quantum leap past this: he explains things using only drawings and a vocabulary of just our 1,000 (or the ten hundred) most common words.
Many of the things we use every day - like our food-heating radio boxes (''microwaves''), our very tall roads (''bridges''), and our computer rooms (''datacentres'') - are strange to us. So are the other worlds around our sun (the solar system), the big flat
Trade Review
A brilliant concept. If you can't explain something simply, you don't really understand it. And Randall Munroe is the perfect guy to take on a project like this . . . If you know Munroe's previous work, it will come as no surprise that parts of Thing Explainer are laugh-out-loud funny . . . filled with cool basic knowledge about how the world works. If one of Munroe's drawings inspires you to go learn more about a subject - including a few extra terms - then he will have done his job. He has written a wonderful guide for curious minds * BILL GATES *
Wonderful * Neil Gaiman *
In the crowded field of trivia, nothing beats Thing Explainer by Randall Munroe, the physicist-turned-comic-artist, a sequel to What If ? . . . It is very funny and has something quite serious to say about our misplaced faith in long words * Daily Telegraph *
Thing Explainer gets to the real essence of things * New Scientist *
Like any good work of science writing, [Thing Explainer] is equal parts lucid, funny, and startling * NewYorker.com *
In just over a decade Randall Munroe has become firmly established and it's safe to say adored as the author of xkcd. Now, Munroe has produced a book - and Thing Explainer isn't just any book. It's beautiful, packed with facts, figures and richly and simply presented diagrams * Register *
Reliably amusing and often enlightening * The Times, Books of the Year *
