Remarkably clear, simple, occasionally funny explanations and diagrams about 55 complicated things. With fabulous blueprints, some fold out pages, smart little funnies and fascinating information, this is suitable for children and adults, in fact I can see the whole family together, studying and talking about this book for hours. Randall Munroe has only used the thousand most common words to write ’Thing Explainer', the thousand words sit at the back with his explanation as to why he chose them, just before a wonderfully large fold out diagram of a skyscraper. My personal favourites were the car engine and battery pages. I giggled, I was enthralled, and I learnt things without my brain being left in a confused bewildered knot, perfect! In other words, this jargon-busting, no-nonsense book is really rather clever indeed. ~ Liz Robinson
December 2015 Book of the Month.
| Primary Genre | Non-Fiction Books of the Month |
| Other Genres: | |
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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 rocks we live on (tectonic plates), and even the stuff inside us (cells). Where do these things come from? How do they work? What do they look like if you open them up? And what would happen if we 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 many, 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.
Thing Explainer Complicated Stuff in Simple Words features in the following genres: Non-Fiction Books of the Month, Books of the Month, Popular Science, Recommendations, Science: general issues, Mathematics and Science
Thing Explainer Complicated Stuff in Simple Words is available in Hardback
Thing Explainer Complicated Stuff in Simple Words was written by Randall Munroe and published by John Murray Publishers Ltd an imprint of John Murray General Publishing Division
Thing Explainer Complicated Stuff in Simple Words has 64 pages