Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words

pictures are great, but the words.... The limited vocabulary makes it nigh unreadable. I just cant get past it, it feels like I am being talked down to. I should have investigated more before I bought it, it is not what I expected. I expected the wordy wit of XKCD and a more through examination of those rather neat informative images he sometimes makes in his webcomic.

Depsite saying it is "simple" I found the drawings way too detailed/small and the massive amount of information (in small font) hard to decypher. I bought it for my non-mechanical son (so he could explain stuff to my grandaughter) but this is way to detailed for non-mechanical folks.

Beyond being a great concept in the first place, it's executed just perfectly with meticulous attention that achieves both humor and cutting edge infotainment. If you have ever been interested in a "how things work" kind of book, this is whole new breed thereof.

Eric Siegel, Ph.D.
Founder, Predictive Analytics World
Author, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

I'm a big fan of Randall's comic and What If? book, but this was fairly disappointing. Rather than trying to present complex idea in a more accessible manner, it is rather juvenile and consistently talks down to the reader. I understand what he was going for, but anyone with a 3 digit IQ is likely to feel insulted by the presentation; even my teenage daughter and 12-year-old son found it unpalatable, despite being enthusiastic for it after their forays into What If?, and the greater interest in science Mr Munroe inspired in them with that work.

I bought this book because it was on Bill Gates' book list. To be honest...it's ok at best. For something called Thing Explainer it actually goes out of it's way to make topics more complicated. Suggest you browse this at a bookstore before buying.

I just don't see the point of the exercise. Using few words makes communication very much more difficult and, I think, sometimes fails to communicate altogether. We have a language and a vocabulary designed to enhance communication. To not use both is just wordplay. I bought the book on the advice of my son. It's interesting, but no more. If you want to understand something more completely, learn the subject and the vocabulary.

We thought it would be great for our 12 year old grandson. But it really only used small words .. so simple we could not understand it without really thinking it through. It is fun ... but more for an adult who will read it just for fun, not for really understanding how things work in simple language.

The goal and idea of the book is amazing. I wanted to use it to introduce my kids to the science behind complex devices and natural phenomena. And to be honest, also to learn those things myself. The book falls short immediately and makes it more complicated to understand the concepts by refusing to label things with real names and instead using simple, but paradoxically more confusing, nomenclature such as "bag of water", "big bag of water", "small bag of water", etc. to refer to the parts of a cell.

I could not go on beyond the first two charts. If you already know the concepts then the book is a handy way of having one-pagers of your knowledge, otherwise it is very hard to gain any real understanding or knowledge from this book

I love Randall Munroe's works, including xkcd.com. I've bought both of his books, and a great poster showing what is in the space beyond our planet to the end of our solar system. I enjoyed this book because it is filled with his signature drawings and great sense of humor. He writes the whole book using the 1000 most common words. Fun to see how he does that.

Bottom line: this is a truly enjoyable book that ultimately succeeds in shedding light on complex things in the world that we may not have paused to consider (submarines, ICBMs and various space travel vehicles) in depth. This lack of consideration may variously result from the inherent complexity of some things (nuclear power plants) or their ubiquity (pens, pencils, roads and bridges).

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.

I purchased this for a friends birthday. Very cool book and plenty to look at. It seems every time you open the book, you could notice something you missed before. It's a funny take on complicated things. I could imagine this is how a kid would see things without really knowing. I think I will start explaining things just like this book does.

If you are a fan of Randall Munroe and XKCD, this book is perfect. If you don't know about Randall, or XKCD, (or even What If?) than what is wrong with you? Don't you enjoy intellectual humor? Don't you like complicated things explained simply? Don't you like blueprints? Go away, and buy something else, like David Macauley's "The Way Things Work" THEN come back to this book and see just how much better it is. Reminds me of the little drawings in the margins of Mad Magazine. But way cooler.

It looks like there are a lot of cool topics covered here, but the author decided to rename everything using "kiddie" names. Sometimes it's clear what he's referring to, but not always. It would have been good to what some of the items were actually called. And as a teaching tool, youngsters need to know the real names of things.

Explanations are well-thought through and very approachable. The repetitiveness of simplified vocabulary, though, gets tiring by about the middle of the book and gets distracting. Still well worth it - for all ages.

The book seems very attractive at first, but there were two main issues for me:
First, it worked poorly on my Ipad. Graphics are very bad, it's difficult to zoom and therefore many parts are not very understandable.
The second issue, is that, as many reviews mention, the lenguage is too basic, so in the end it gets difficult to understand "the little thing that hits the other little sing in the bright box and that then does something" (this is NOT an actual quote, it's how I feel the explanations were presented). It is very vague, and in the end it makes it harder to deduce what the author is talking about. Would not recommend it.

The language is too simple for me to enjoy. I fully understand it specifies, "Simple" in the title, but it's just goofy. I was hoping to have it a notch above where it is. Also, it does not work on Kindle Paperwhite nor the Desktop reader. I've never seen a product that had those restrictions.

Randall Munroe does it again with this wildly entertaining and informative book!

The premise is simple (sort of), he only uses the most common words in the English language to explain complicated subjects like how your dryer works to the observable universe to rocket science (a rocket is an "up goer" and NASA is "US Space Team").

The entire premise of this book is to explain complicated concepts using only the 1000 most common words. If that sounds totally awesome to you, you will like this book. If you expect it to do that, and then also use other, additional words, then yeah, I suppose that you will be disappointed. This book delivered exactly what it set out to do, and I loved it.

This simple little book is excellent. I bought two for gifts for children about 12 years old. When they arrived I could hardly put it down. Extremely well written and drawn for any age above 8 ....all the way up.

Funny and informative. Munroe delivers as always.

Things to note:
Book only has about 70 pages, but it is very large, so it makes up for it.
There are fold-out pages as well.
While the book explains things in simple terms, Munroe doesn't hesitate to add his signature comics throughout his explanations.

My son and I have really enjoyed the blueprint drawings and all the words. We have a lot of fun trying to guess what the less common name or word is that is being described. The explanations themselves are pretty wonderful on the most part, and they are really easy to understand.

Randall Munroe has created another hit with the Thing Explainer. It will make you laugh and help you learn, whether you're eight years old or eighty. I plan to give it to my best friends for Christmas.

This book says lots of good things. It explains all kinds of hard things using easy words: how your water room works, computer houses, space cars, and lots of other really nice and really important thngs.

If you know something really well, please write what you know using ten hundred words. Lots of other people wrote their own ten hundred word pieces, about lots of things I did - it's fun!

So, read this book to learn cool things about cool stuff. But, if you already know things other people do not, and you want every one every where to know it too, please read this book. Use simple words, and lots more people will know why you love what you love, and will know why every one should care.

-- wiredweird, using only ten hunrded words

Bought this as a gift, but couldn't hardly put it down! It's a wonderful, quirky book that anyone will enjoy. They'll keep right on enjoying it, too, as there will always be something they missed the first time through! Loved it!

I loved Munroe's "What If?" So I expected to love this as well. But it was too simplistic. I want at least some real vocabulary along with explanations. Munroe's humor and cartoons are great as usual, I just wish it wasn't dumbed down quite so much.

I really wanted to like this book. I like all of Mr. Munroe's other efforts -XKCD, and What if?, but I just couldn't get into this book. I don't know if it's supposed to be a satire of dumb Americans, or educational for small kids, or both, or neither.

"Complicated Stuff in Simple Words" could be sufficient for a review and follow in the theme of the book, but I will expand. If you are familiar with XKCD comic the humor in Thing Explainer will be very familiar. In particular, the comic has a recurring theme where complicated science/engineering concepts are reduced to simple drawings with descriptive, but simple language call outs. That is the book in a nutshell. Each page explains a different "thing" so you can pick it up and put it down at any time, or flip to any page. The XKCD comic tends to aim for the technical/science/geek audience, but I think this book would appeal to people with technical and non-technical backgrounds as long as they have a basic level of curiosity or desire to understand technical things a little better (let's be honest, not everyone has that trait). For topics one does not fully understand, the non-technical terms are welcome; and for topics one does understand well, it's amusing to see what language is used in lieu of technical terms. There are also funny little cartoon sketches in the margins that would appeal to anyone. My only complaint about the book, and the reason I subtracted a star, is that I think the author should have broken his simple word rule for proper names. I often felt like rewording of proper names was overly complicated/confusing without adding anything to the explanation of how the thing actually worked. Regardless, it's still a very good book.

I think the hard cover book can be justified to adorn a living room coffee table for entertainment or fun reference material (emphasis on fun). It works well as bathroom reading material too. I don't feel as if a digital version would be as useful as the hard cover, but that might just be a matter of personal preference.

Disclosure: I have a science-related degree and I bought this book as a Christmas gift for my significant other who does not have a science/engineering background, but is interested in knowing how things work. I paged through Thing Explainer for a quite a while before wrapping it and that's what this review is based on. I may edit this review based on the feedback I receive about this gift.

UPDATE 1/12/16: My wife very much enjoys this book and I have been reading more of it as well. I still stand by my opinion above that the book is appropriate for geeks and non-geeks. Also, I suspect some older children/teens may enjoy this book too, but I have none in my household to test that theory on.

This book doesn't even attempt to be what it purports to be. It's not an explainer of anything; it's an exercise in linguistics. It seeks to explain complicated things using only the 1000 most commonly used words (or, more truly, the 997 most commonly used non-offensive words) but then, it doesn't actually seek to do it simply. For example, both "lock" and "key" are in the 1000-word list. Both are very common words. Yet he refuses to use either of these words in describing a padlock, choosing instead to call it a "shape checker." The words "lock" (shape checker) and "key" (piece of metal of a certain shape) could have been used, and they were omitted simply to make the process more challenging. Same with the word "thousand" which he has to work around throughout the book. He could have easily put "thousand" in place of one of the four-letter words that aren't particularly useful in this book, but he had to call it "ten hundred" and so on because, well, he enjoys the limitations. For humorous purposes, no doubt, and it makes for interesting reading but make no mistake, Thing Explainer is not an actual explainer of things. It's a book about language. If you're into language, you might be amused by the unusual use of language contained herein. Personally, I would have liked it better if it had been a more sincere attempt to truly write simply.

Spend your money on learning how to construct Rube Goldberg contraptions or buy play dough to make castles---your sense of accomplishment will far surpass the anti-creative contraptions and blathering jibberish thrown together as an the store hack called a "book".

Though this book isn't the best way to learn how things work, it is the easiest. It provides simple descriptions that accurately build mental models of complex things for newcomers and let those in the know see these things in a new light.

Randall Munroe hits another one out of the park! I've been following his comic, XKCD, online for years. I had previously bought a collection of his comics in book form and his best seller, "What If", and I had high expectations for this book. Randall did not disappoint! Using only the ten one hundred (1000) most commonly use words in the English language he illustrates and explains items from single cells to microwave ovens to the entire universe!

A fun book but in its attempt to make complex ideas accessible it ends up obscuring them even further with its technique of using simple language. Complex language may not be egalitarian but it's purpose is to illuminate the difficult to explain.

It is a great concept, one I thought would be really helpful. I was disappointed at how things which SHOULD have been named directly were not. By assuming so little knowledge, it made it too difficult to read or share with my grandkids.

I bought this book for my dad. He loved it so much, he brought it to work to show his coworkers. They all thought the book was hilarious! It's very educational, but fun. It's a great coffee table book.

While I can applaud the premise of the book. I thought I was buying something completely different. I thought complicated scientific, technological, biological, astronomical, or other would be explained in lay terms and illustrations. But this is so difficult to read, in that it's so overly dumbed down, that it ceases to be fun, entertaining, and definitely not educational. I just wasted my money.

If you loved David Macaulay's "How Things Work", this is right up your alley. Great illustrations, hilarious side commentary, and exactly what it says on the label -- complicated stuff in simple words.

The funny computer picture guy made a big book of pictures, making things that are not easy look easy. This book is big and good. Please get it for little versions of yourself, your friends, and also for people who used to be you a long time ago...

Ah, shucks - I can't do the book or the review justice. But I'm no NASA scientist, so that's probably why. The book is very entertaining, beautifully produced, and should make a great gift for yourself and your loved ones.

Unusual, big format of the book.Nice and long-to-look schemes - i like, when they are in books. And this is the whole book of them.
Nice to have, when you learn English, and your vocabulary is small.
Perfect for children, who wants to know what different things are.
I wish I could have such a book in my native language.

this book is interesting but i wish it was digital and there could be a link to a detailed article for each of the over simplified explanations. i understand that the idea behind the book is to keep things simple but they just make me more curious.

This is absolutely outstanding. Each page is a little treasure trove of information. On pages where I'm familiar with the scientific concepts, I love seeing how Munroe describes them. On pages where I'm not familiar with the concepts, I'm learning a lot, and realizing that I can take the basic ideas that Munroe provides and look up more technical sources and understand them better. I want to share this with everyone I know!

This was a gift for my younger brother and he loved it. I'm so glad Randall Munroe wrote another book. His webcomics are always insightful, funny and worth reading, so it makes sense that his books are at the top of any XKCD fan's list.

The only drawback was that the book arrived slightly damaged in one corner, but the jacket covers it.

Awesome amount of detail to explain simple stuff. Showed it to my father, an MS in Engineering and 30-year veteran greybeard in the industry, and he was fascinated for quite a while. Little bro loved it too. Good for all ages!

I thought that "simple words" would mean simple explanations, but I wind up feeling annoyed because he can't just say it like it is. He has to use only those 1000 words. The best fun of it is trying to guess the "real" words that he's not allowed to use. A detail oriented kid would want accurate vocabulary to go with it.

Best book ever. I'm going around referring to coffee as fast-water and my kids as "partial information copy water bags." This is a humor book that is also, but not primarily, instructive. I'd love to read it to a grand-child, but I don't have any yet, so I'm reading it myself. I'm trying to keep back to one or two pages a day so I don't use it up.

"Box that cleans food holders: This box is a machine that cleans plates and cups by throwing water at them. The water is full of cleaning stuff, which helps the water stick to the food and pull it off.
If you fill a cleaning box the wrong way, it may not clean well. After people see this happen a few times, they can get strong opinions about the right way to fill a plate cleaner. When people with different ideas about these machines start living together, this can even lead to fights. "

The truth is, I don't know it I love or hate this book because I cannot see any of the text it contains. I am somewhat vision impaired and I have no interest in trying to read things through a microscope or even a magnifying glass. If there were a version of the book with both the length and width doubled, the text would start to approach readable for me (and I would probably buy it, too). I got the hardcover and cannot even imagine anyone trying to read it one a Kindle where thr fonts might be only a couple pixels tall (assuming they scale directly down to my old 7" Kindle Keyboard's screen).

Normally I would review a book I haven't read, but it seems that a boot I CANNOT read because of how it is produced is a valid reason for a review. Maybe Randall will see it and look into making a readable version available for people like me, who think that 12 pt text is rather small for reading.

My husband is a big fan of Munroe. He already knew he was getting this for Christmas, so the few weeks since it arrived have made him very anxious to read Thing Explainer! Arrived on time and in great condition!

I really love XKCD which is why it pains me to give this 2 stars. The 1000 word limit is just painful to read. On the things I under stand, I know what he is trying to talk about, but for the few topics I didn't know anything about it was just baffling. Maybe the book is really meant for people without any technical or scientific background or children. If so I am the wrong demographic, but then so is almost everyone who reads XKCD.
The art was great and the little side doodles are amusing.

I find these explanations to be over-simplified to the point of being incorrect. Any liquid is ubiquitously described as a type of “water”; why not call gasoline “gasoline” instead of “fire water”? Readers probably know that gasoline goes into an engine. The automotive transmission is not a “wheel box”; readers know what gears are, so call them gears. In a nuclear reactor the spent fuel rods go into the “used metal room”, although the terms “spent” and “fuel” are not used. A virus is clearly described as one of the “things that make you sick” with a detailed explanation, but the word “virus” is never used. The book does do a good job of describing the components and operation of complex assemblies, but fails to tie the simple explanations back to the true nature or terminology of the real world.

I hope you have good vision. Most of the book is printed in itty bity print in grey on blue and my old eyes couldn't read it even if I tried hard. Buyer beware. "What If" was super. This - not so.

A work of genius. I fell in love with his idea of explaining difficult things using only common words when he released "Up Goer Five" to the world on xkcd, and ran back and forth to my mailbox like a seven-year-old today waiting for the book to arrive. Pay special attention to "The US's Laws of the Land", which is a quick lesson in civics that you - and those who hold opposing political beliefs to yours - would do well to read. "Never mind about getting rid of beer and wine" indeed. :)

It takes a little while to get into the rhythm of the simple words, and then it feels almost natural. As usual, Randall's writing and sketches are great. Bring a magnifying glass, because some of the illustrations and most of the text are small.

I like the last phrase of the book's text, in the credits section, with its tribute to his significant other, "Strong Pretty Ring-Wearer."

Another inspiring work from Randall Munroe. Thing Explainer gives you insight into complicated systems with simple language. It avoids the problem many face when they dive into learning where they get bogged down in technical terminology. Not in this book. The jargon is stripped away and replaced with simple, short explanations which give you a good overview of the subject.

1: The Kindle edition is VERY difficult to read on my 7" Kindle Fire HD. Because of the extensive, complex graphics I have to enlarge and scroll, which is a giant pain.

2: Once the cuteness wears off (after about the third topic), the book is very taxing to read. Many of the "simple" descriptive words are inappropriate in-context and the "actual" descriptive words that anyone above the age of 12 knows are sorely missed. A needlessly convoluted read in the name of cleverness.

I appreciate the concept, but I expected something more along the lines of a visual dictionary with clear definitions. This was esoteric, which made it a bit unapproachable unless you understood Munroe's brand of humor and way of thinking. Own another of Munroe's books, but I'm not a fan of this one.

It does explain things quite well, it's a good exercise to read this book, too, as you have to map the simple descriptions to the "big words" you have already learned, and it gives you a chance to think what things really are in its most essence, and that written language is just but a tool that enables you to communicate more effeciently or other way around.

Also, it comes in unexpectedly large format, it's a really big book, this is necessary for the tiny details on those huge infographics, make sure you get a print book.

Highly recommended.

I bought this on recommendation from Bill Gates if I remember correctly. I thought my granddaughter who is on the Autism Spectrum and who tends to be very literal would enjoy reading some of this with me. She didn't and I find it very tedious.

Incredibly innovative concept, but failed to deliver. The idea of simplifying things for a regular Joe to understand is awesome. However, only people who want to learn buy this type of book. The over simplification of terms renders the work useless and even frustrating at times. Calling everything a "thing" is OK when dealing with kindergartens, not adults.

The concept is neat, but the author goes overboard in using overly simplified language. There are basic concepts where it sounds like a 4 year old is trying to explain something, which is fine and the point of the book, but it doesn't always translate into helping you to understand the concept any better.

This book was a little of a disappointment. Its still interesting, but the verbose language gets annoying. I know that using a limited vocabulary was a major premise of the book, but it feels like it gets in the way. I love the diagrams, however!

I was hoping for an update to the great 1988 book "The Way Things Work" by David Macaulay. While the author has obviously put a ton of effort into this volume, "Thing Explainer" has minuscule type and very, very, very busy pages filled with the line drawings of the item being described, a tremendous amount of very small-type description and numerous arrows running here and there.

Some of the pages make no sense when you first see them - for example, the illustration and description of an internal combustion engine is on a fold out page which only makes a small bit of sense after you open to fold out. Even the illustration and description of this internal combustion engine is very hard to follow. Illustrations in only two colors (as I recall), blue and white.

Many of the items described have titles which did not resonate with what the item was he was describing. If I had not already packed this up to return to the store I would give you some examples. A major disappointment. Two stars From me only because of the huge amount of effort the author has put into this - otherwise I would rate this one star.

This book is brilliant. The drawings are crisp on both the hard copy and digital copy. The book is entertaining to read yet informative at the same time. A great read for anyone who is curious about how things work but can't understand, as the author Randall Munroe put it, the big words.

i quickly tired of the labored renaming of common objects e.g.: "box that cleans food holders" for dishwasher ( I think we all know what a dish is; and what "to wash" means) so please define the term if you must then continue on with the explanation of its workings. I applaud the simple yet precise descriptions of the inner workings of everyday objects, but the word play is tiresome.

This book is great and this author is great. This comment's actual purpose is to complain about the quality of the book's dust jacket, which is not great. It feels like nice material, but unfortunately, it isn't the glossy type that resists marks; instead, it's a soft matte type of material that picks up dirt and scuff marks like a magnet. When I opened my the store box, the book instead, which should have been pristine and new, had dirt marks all over the edges of the dust jacket, obviously from rubbing against its packaging. How disappointing! I believe everyone should buy and read this book, but just be aware that due to unwise material choices, it will probably not arrive cleanly.
(Warning: The exact same situation happened to the other Munroe book I bought, "What If?")

While I love most of the content, I feel that the book has serious usability problems. Its dimensions clearly make it a coffee-table volume, and yet the print is far too small, dull, and low-contrast to read without intense lighting and close inspection. On most pages, a byzantine wall of words and diagrams fills the page from top to bottom, including both margins, with neither an apparent place to start or end, nor any place for the eye to rest. The overall impression is intimidating and tiring. The best pages are most parsimonious — the tree page for example leaves breathing room for the reader, and the natural shape of the tree gives structure to the illustration and lets the reader meander with some semblance of a path.

Additionally, I can't help feeling that the project of using simple words to explain complex subjects falls flat from time to time; not in the explanation of the subject, but when it cannot be made clear what the subject is. When the book becomes not an explication but a needlessly frustrating mental puzzle, it can be more tiresome than it is worth. This pops up most frequently in the innumerable insets and notes.

In fairness, the book is still amusing and engaging for all of these problems (though most who pick it up seem to put it down again when frustration pulls level with entertainment value) and again, all of this would be fine in a volume that one intended to carefully study over a well-lit desk, but given the book's sheer size and style of binding, this is not practical. The book may be less suitable for adults, and better for intelligent young people with sharp eyes and curious minds.

I've loved Randall's work for years. And the book, both in concept and execution, is nearly flawless. But.

It's too simple and with him actively trying to only use the most common "ten one hundred" words in the English language, it's almost TOO dumbed down. The things he's trying to explain (cellular activity, nuclear power generation, etc) are, by their nature, complicated subjects. So while the concept of simple explanations is a good one, it might have been helpful to have the NEXT page of each drawing have the "technical" term used on an identical drawing and in the same place. This would allow someone to actually use his diagrams to LEARN - because while his simplicity is refreshing, the rest of the world still uses the jargon and technical terms. And, given that the book is only 61 pages long, it wouldn't have increased production costs or time all that much.

I'm not reviewing the content of the book. Instead I'm reviewing the format. I read mostly (99%) on electronic devices (Kindle paperwhite, kindle for iphone...). This book does not load on a kindle paperwhite - its not in a compatible format. On the phone the font is too small to see and because there are illustrations you can not adjust the font size.

I guess I have to order the dead tree version

This book was a surprise. I wasn't expecting such detailed drawings! And the large hardcover format is great although I can't fit it in my messenger bag, it's best as a coffee table volume. And your guests will be very entertained. I couldn't stop laughing perusing the table of contents, "bags of stuff inside you" in place of "organs", "boxes that make clothes smell better" instead of washer and dryer. Brilliant! Each item has a general explanation, and then a ton of little captions detailing each part.

Yet beyond the humor I am actually quite impressed with the written detail. It takes some serious imagination to work around some of these high flown concepts and still deliver meaning. I'm a big fan of XKCD and What If? and this was no disappointment.

In addition to almost anyone, I would recommend this book for young children and ESL learners as it has super interesting and pretty accurate drawings and a you can actually understand these things, though it may not be a great vocabulary booster.

To the critics: just be glad he didn't choose to use the 1000 most *uncommon* words.

The Thing Explainer uses simple names for parts of complicated things. In some cases, it seems pretty silly, but in other cases the name explains the function. The stuff explained is, as stated, "complicated" to begin with. I'm not sure my grandson will find it that interesting, but will find out.

I like the author, the idea, and the design of the book. But as I bought it as a gift, I have to reduce a star. Because the jacket of the book arrived dirty and has some wear on an edge. After all, it doesn't look like new enough to be gifted (I bought with the store Prime, seller is the store). So my bookshelf gets a new member and I have to think of a better gift idea...

Replaces well known concepts and terms with vague terms. Why? I found this distracting and annoying. For example they call a nuclear power plant a "heavy metal power building". Hey son, do you see that? It must be one of those heavy metal power buildings!?!?

I understand the concept, using only the 1,000 (ten hundred, as the book says) most common words to describe things and also humor, but this is a frustrating book to have around the house. My 12 year old loved it, at first. But while she's reading it she's constantly asking (or googling) what the 'real' name is for something. The examples are countless but especially frequent on the periodic table. All the elements are described with cryptic passages. 'Don't breathe this stuff as dust or you die' or 'metal we add to other metals' or 'metal that tells us about the early earth'. She wants to know which elements all this cool stuff is referring to, but by the 4th or 5th one she's annoyed and puts the book down. The emergency room page describing things as 'pushing machines' or 'person watcher'. Lost count of all the times I heard "Ugh! Just tell me what it is!" Nicely made book, like the size etc, but its just not for us. Would have been better if actual terms were in parenthesis or something.

I'd love to read this, but make sure you have a device on which you can zoom in to the drawing detail. Sadly, you cannot read this in the cloud reader (why the store, why??) and it's essentially unreadable on Kindle for Windows 8 which has no zoom function. Four stars for the content, but I had to return this. It would be nice if the store updated their app based readers to cope with this kind of content.

new review - DO NOT forget to look at the table of contents! After Bruce brought that to my attention I changed my opinion. This book is awesome! I already read it and it was only delivered yesterday! Thank you Bruce!

old review - Soooooooo… after my 12-year-old learns from this book, what will she say she learned about? It would be nice if kids knew what the name of the “thing” that is being explained is called.

I absolutely loved What If and was therefore looking forward to reading Munroe's new book. What a disappointment! The idea is certainly original but is not suited to a whole book. After three pages I was already regretting having bought it.

I'm experiencing severe cognitive dissonance because of the euphemisms being used for the names of the things. I want to know how things work, not divine the clever name someone is calling something and go through that extra abstraction layer in my head. Further, I don't care to parse the rhetorical context of something like "city-burner" to mean "nuclear missile." Just say "missile."

Also, the line drawings, while interesting, are in 2D style and not particularly well-done at that. I can't fault the style since it is XKCD, but still. Try varying the line quality a little.

After What if?, I had high hopes for Thing Explainer. This is a large format book, best read on paper: do not buy the Kindle edition, as it requires a really huge piece of paper to fit in most of the illustrations, and I can only imagine that reading it on a tablet or e-ink Kindle device would be an exercise in frustration.

The book's conceit is that Munroe would only use the 10,000 most commonly used English words to label the diagrams, which range from an examination of the Earth's Crust to a tear down of a smart phone to a Nuclear power plant. I call it a conceit because in many cases, using the proper nouns would have helped the clarity of the book, and using the simple words simply made the book more obscure. For instance, calling an engine a "fire box" is more confusing than using the word, "engine." The most ludicrous example of this came when he presents the periodic table of elements. In essence, having a label such as "Metal that Tells Us About the Early Earth" rather than Niobium doesn't help whatsoever.

As a result, the title of the book is a lie. The book can only explain the objects it claims to explain only because you, the reader, already know what it's explaining. If you tried to show this to a child, the poor kid would probably get more confused as a result of the "explanation" than if you actually used big words and answered questions patiently.

All in all, I'm glad I checked this book out of the library. There's amusement in puzzling out what each long chain of sentences in the book is talking about, and the diagrams are great, but there's no way you'd walk away from the book more enlightened than when you first picked it up.

The illustrations are beautiful and extremely well detailed, maybe even poster worthy. The book also provides just the right amount of detail to describe each subject without becoming overbearing like an encyclopedia. Overall it was very entertaining and would recommend to any XKCD fan.

I bought this on the strength of Bill Gates' recommendation. I don't know WHAT he was thinking. The target audience seems to be fourth graders. They may even be too sophisticated for it. It might be marginally educational if he would tell us the actual names of things he's describing.

More difficult to understand that I thought, mostly because the other restricts himself to the one thousand most common words in the english dictionary. Personally, I think "sky boat with turning wings" is more difficult to understand than "helicopter" so this book really wasn't for me.

I bought this based on how much I loved "What If?", but I after three pages, I skimmed the rest and didn't even finish. Were this a blog post you could look at for free, it would be an interesting look at how a writer challenges himself and continues to hone his craft; however, an exercise in simplification of language does not make for an interesting read.
For example, the second page is a diagram of a cell. I was not able to figure out what any of the parts were. Granted, I am relying on my memory of 10th grade biology, but it would seem he was paying more attention to the words he was using than to whether the description made sense. While "What If?" was educational and entertaining, "Thing Explainer" is interesting, possibly entertaining at parts, but often confusing and requires too much work deciphering for little-to-no pay off.
Borrow from your local library if you are intrigued, but I do not recommend buying this, even for fans of his other work.

I pretty much hate this book.

It has tons of potential and is illustrated very well. It's a fun book and I really want to like it buuuut... it just goes out of its way to make you dumb. If your child reads this it will make him/her think that porcupines are actually called "pointy cats", an engine is called a "fire box", helicopters are called "sky boats", jet engines are called "sky boat pushers" and almost never is a real term used. If you want to know the real term good luck. And you can't really Google it either because your child will be Googling "what's a sky boat really called", which doesn't lead anywhere useful. There are some pretty complicated things in here as well, things adults could easily learn from but again you're out of luck... You'll be calling tech support to tell them that "the "power hole" in my "bending computer" is acting up, or is it my "sound box" or "air blower" anyways here's the numbers on the "sticker that yells at me"".

If this book consistently put the actual term next to or within its description then it would be brilliant and fun. Instead it's just going to make you a moron.

While this book really does explain things in a basic manner, the actual names of things explained are often not used. This was disappointing to me. If I am going to learn something, then I want to learn the actual names for future reference and discussion. For instance, a Helicopter is called a Sky Boat with Turning Wings, Pointing Wings and a Turning Stick. No mention of Rotors or other normal nomenclature. The book itself is hardcover with a nice jacket and well printed. Sorry I didn't like it at all.

Edit: 12/23/2015

In spending some more time with the book I feel like I may have been a bit harsher than is fair, and wanted to expand on my persecptive. I still find what I said below for many of the pages, but in some cases, the humor shines through, and for items that are more familiar to the general public (such as bridges etc.) it is a little easier to follow what is being expressed.

Original Review

As someone who often finds learning about new subjects difficult because of the expectation within the field that you are familiar with the language specific to that field, I loved what I assumed the idea of this book was: explanations in lay-mans terms of what complex items were. (Let's face it, at this point in time Wikipedia articles for anything scientific are generally extremely technical, and you can't even be sure you are getting the facts there. I therefore had high hopes for this book...)

What to me could have been an incredibly useful book, is in fact pretty much useless. What actually is offered in the book comes across more as a project/challenge that the author set for himself; to write about complex things using just the 1000 most common words in the English language (referred to as "ten hundred" because "thousand" is not one of the 1000 most common words."

The result is that the book is borderline useless when it comes to trying to learn anything. For many items the wording made it impossible for me to understand what was even being referenced, and there is no discrimination between information that is fundamentally important, and what is trivial (so not only do you have to have a legitimate source open next to this book to begin to comprehend what is being said, you might find yourself spending time to figure something out, only to discover he was labeling something that is really irrelevant to any useful understanding.)

What you ultimately have here is a very tall (it's coffee table sized), very thin (under 70 pages) book that highlights the author's whimsy and creativity, while at the same time being (in my opinion) very frustrating to read. The repetition of the same words got very old very quickly for me, and I learned nothing from the book.

Clever attempt but falls extremely short. I was directed to this book after buying (and loving) "What If? Scientific answers to hypothetical questions" Obviously a lot of work went into this book which is why I hate to rate it one star. I have purchased over 30 kindle books, including medical reference books and handbooks and this is the first time I have felt the need to write a review.

I have not found it helpful or intriguing, at best it is mildly amusing. Mildly. I was hoping I would be able to use some of the entries to help explain science and nature to my daughter and boys in an illustrative manner. The book entries themselves (and the Kindle format) or horrible for this. As a physician and amateur astronomer I can explain science, math and biology to others (including kids) and I'm disappointed this book could not serve as another tool in this endeavor. Very disappointed with this purchase.

Big fan of XKCD and the artistic style. I bought this book for the pictures but I can't get passed the hard to decipher "simple words". For example, I thought "pipe" was a simple enough and common word, but it gets translated to "water bringer". Or "ink". Not simple enough, so it's now called "writing water". The worst offense of this translation is the renaming of the Mars rovers and spacecraft. Instead of Pathfinder, he calls it Road Finder. Opportunity = Good Chances Car. I have no idea what the others are supposed to be. Which Mars satellite is Old North Person One? It's one thing to translate words, but at least call things with names by their actual names.

Whatever the motivation for this book, it was a huge disappointment. If this gets translated back to a 6th grade reading level, I may purchase it again. Superb artwork, interesting material, but ultimately unreadable.

First of all, this a large-format (13" x 9") book like you would leave on your coffee table to make a statement about your interests and impress your guests. Second, it's a book full of diagrams explaining technical things with simple words and dry humor, not a narrative book. So if you're looking at this because you liked What If? and wanted a sequel, this is not it. And if you mostly buy kindle books like I do, don't even think about trying to read this on a small screen.

But those are not my reasons for a so-so review. For what it is, it's okay. There's nothing else quite like it, so it is a fun, fresh approach. And as always, Randall Munroe is a very clever explainer. But the novelty wears off quickly, and sometimes the terminology is so simple that it is more effort to understand. I found that I mostly enjoyed the fun approach to breaking down systems that I are already understood as opposed to actually learning from it about something with which I am not as familiar.

While I'm sure people much, much smarter than me would find this book absolutely wonderful, to me it seems as though it was meant to be a writing exercise rather than something for publication. It manages to be both overly simplified and incredibly confusing, so much so that I often couldn’t tell what “thing” Munroe was trying to explain. I think having the actual name of the “things” in parenthesis--while going against the grain of the book’s premise--would have gone a long way toward making this book more interesting.

Disclaimer; I'm a big fan of Randall Munroe and his work, both on XKCD and in his book What If? He has a great sense of humor, and is very talented at explaining complicated concepts clearly and cleverly. This book is an adult version of those children's books that explain how things work. It's fascinating stuff, and most people will learn quite a bit. There is the same humor as in other texts, and there are a number of hidden, easter-egg type jokes in there, as well. My biggest criticism is with the delivery of this content- by choosing to limit himself to a thousand commonly-used words, Munroe actually shoots himself in the foot by making things LESS clear. I understand that he aimed to teach people the concepts and broad strokes of a process (say, supercolliders), but constantly using artificially limiting terms such as "big little thing hammer" actually ended up frustrating me and forcing me to reread passage that I might have understand had he used the actual terms. I agree with other reviewers that including the real term in parentheses would have been nice, as would a more legible font/layout. Recommended, but look before you buy.

I wanted to like this book, being a fan of the original comic and What If. But I'm glad I didn't buy it (mine was a library book). Someone else mentioned that, since the book only contains the most commonly used words and not the actual words we normally use to label something, it's somewhat confusing. I agree...he hit the nail on the head with what I didn't like about the book. You actually already had to know everything about the topic being described, just so you could understand...what was being described. So as a teaching/learning tool, not so much. As a fun gimmick, okay...but personally I found it pretty meh after awhile. Munroe's normally clever wit and humor isn't all that evident. It's like he was really trying to write a textbook for a future full of people with a very limited vocabulary. The original Up Goer 5 was great...but like a lot of artists these days, I think Munroe succumbed to the temptation to cash in by taking something that's great in a limited form and trying to make it bigger. The internet has proven time and again that if 1 is good, 100 isn't necessarily better, and this is a solid demonstration of that principle, in my opinion.

As a person with a knack for science and a degree in physics, I found this book worthwhile. It had lots of interesting information put in a new light. I reviewed a lot of things I already knew, explained differently. I also learned a lot of new things.

Favorite pages included "Bags of Stuff Inside You" (organs) and "Picture Taker" (camera), among many others. One revelation I had was how your bladder is separate from your digestive system. Prior to reading this book, I guess I had the vague idea that when you drink a bunch of water and have to pee, the water takes a straight shot from your mouth to your stomach to your intestines to your bladder. In fact, it it takes a trip from your intestines around your blood stream and then to your kidneys to your bladder. It even passes through your heart and lungs on the way, and possibly your liver. I can't believe I didn't know this before.

Some of the book seemed pointless, like the page on sports fields. On other pages, some opportunities for learning were missed, like explaining more of the science behind submarines rather than superficial details. The 1,000 word limit is a double edged sword; it can be awkward and overly vague at times, but amusing and illuminating at other times. I think the same content could be presented in a very accessible and entertaining manner without the strained restriction on vocabulary. Regardless, the book overall had enough interesting information, presented in a novel and fun manner, to be a valuable reading experience.

I don't know that I would recommend this book for someone without a decent high school science education under them. I felt like I had to leverage my science knowledge to understand and appreciate much of what he was saying. Even then, I found myself going to the Internet for more information quite often.

Not sure what all the hub-bub is about. I bought this book and tried to enjoy it, but it's nothing special so I returned it. The font size of the entire book is incredibly small and hard to read. In addition, the author's use of only common words makes you feel like a third grader, rather than an adult understanding complex concepts. Interesting idea but poor execution, so I sent mine back and got a refund.

I wrote this review for my fanzine for National Puzzlers' League members:
Randall Munroe's most recent book is Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words. It should interest many of the NPL because it’s an example of constrained writing, à la Oulipo, but for instructional rather than purely esthetic purposes. It uses ‘the ten hundred words people use the most’ to explain things like the shared space house (International Space Station), boats that go under the sea (submarines), hole-making city boats (oil rigs), and the big tiny thing hitter (Large Hadron Collider). Read this book and you’ll learn something on every page, and have fun doing it. Besides the text, his webcomic stick figures are doing amusing stuff in the interstices of the highly detailed diagrams: riding a Mars lander, doing illegal things with soccer balls, stuff like that.
Not ‘purely esthetic’, I say, because a webcomic esthetic is evident throughout. At the end of his word list, he writes, ‘In this set, I count different word forms—like “talk”, “talking”, and “talked”—as one word. I also allowed most “thing” forms of “doing” words, like “talker”—especially if, like “goer”, it wasn’t a real word but it sounded funny. In some places, I didn’t use words even when they were allowed. I could have said “ship”, but I stuck to “boat” because “space boat” makes me laugh.’ I imagine this is why, in constructing his word list, he omitted ‘nine’. And possibly ‘thousand’.
And given two ways to explain something, he picks the funnier. Under ‘Sky Boat with Turning Wings’ (helicopter), in the ‘What if Everything Breaks?’ section, he writes, ‘Trees make babies by dropping tiny wooden tree eggs on the ground. To help the trees spread farther, some trees put small leaf wings on their eggs to slow their fall so the wind can blow them. The wings aren’t very big, so they aren’t able to slow the eggs much—but they turn. That lets them fall very slowly and blow very far. So don’t worry if your sky boat turns off. It can still fly, just like a tiny spinning leaf, carrying you to the ground alive and safe.’
Some of the biggest sections are particularly interesting for puzzlers if you know something about them and try to map the names to more standard names. For example, there are three examples of perissodactyls in ‘Tree of Life’: the related ‘horse’ and ‘store check-out horse’, and on a separate branch, the ‘gray truck animal with a pointy face’. (The teeny pictures make it clear what’s what.) I don’t know what the long-necked ‘almost cat’ is, though; civet? Mongoose? I spent an hour or two trying to match up all the constellations in ‘The Sky at Night’, like ‘bird with a long back end that looks like a big painting’ (Pavo), ‘gray dog that’s not our friend’ (Lupus), and ‘pretend horse with a head point’ (Monoceros), three of the wordier ones. Also ‘table for god stuff’ (Ara). I never did find Coma Berenices. Can you figure out ‘weight counter’, ‘young woman’, ‘big cat’, ‘water animal with hand cutters’, and ‘heavy animal with head points’? I learned a good bit from ‘The Pieces Everything is Made of’, like the fact that barium is ‘rock that looks like a cool tiny city’ (barium crystals are beautiful) and thallium is ‘metal we used for killing animals but stopped because it was too good at it’.
Highliest recommended.

PS: 'Canes Venatici' is plural.

Horrible- Bill Gated recommended this book.
It explains some really interesting things you may want to know more about but does so in the MOST ELEMENTARY WAY. So if you ever wanted to use the info found in the book as reference you would essentially sound like a third grader. Sooo ya, great book for a young kid

I have never wanted to review an the store purchase as much as I want to review this nonsense. I bought this based on a review. There was a brief warning that the simplistic language used could be annoying, but this is a major understatement. How puerile is this ? The author justifies it by saying he uses the 1000 words most used in our language. But he can't say 1000, he has to say ten hundred. ! Does this mean that the word one thousand isn't in the 1000 most used words ? And if so, who cares ? Here are some examples of the arrant stupidity of this book. A pen is a writing stick. A camera is a picture taker. A laptop is a bending computer (!). A bridge is a tall road (!). Oil is fire water. An oil drill (get this !) is a hole making city boat !! The hadron collider is a Big tiny thing hitter ! A plane is a sky boat. A jet engine is a Sky boat pusher ! A space rocket is an Up goer five. A bathroom is A water room. A nuclear bomb is a Machine for burning cities. A dish washer is A box that cleans food holders ! A padlock is a Shape checker. A microwave oven is a Food heating radio box. A helicopter is A sky boat with turning wings. A clothes washing machine is A box that makes clothes smell better ! Your nose is A hole to the outside (your mouth also). Your heart is a Blood pusher. Your bladder is a Yellow water holder. Your intestine is A big food hallway. Your lungs are Air Bags. The Mars Curiosity vehicle is Red world space car. 50 is half a hundred. And this is a tiny fraction of the insane descriptions you will find here.
These mindless explanations do nothing whatsoever to make these things more understandable. In fact it is the reverse. It may take you 15 minutes to work out what he is actually describing. If you want to spend hours grinding your teeth in frustration this is the book for you. If you want to keep your teeth. Don't bother with it. It is ridiculous

This book is witty and funny. I wish so badly that it either had parentheses with the real terms in them. Like on the Bags of Water page. It is great for my kids to read all about these bags of water....but I desperately wish there was one place on the page that told them that they are call cells. I get that this is a statement book, but a lift-and-flap book with real terms underneath could make it a real learning and teaching tool, instead of something that needs constant explanation from mom. ( "Mom, what are the bags really called?".....for every page). If nothing else it gets kids interested in new things, but it can't do anything more than that.

"Fun" I guess yeah but the biggest issue I have with it is that it should also have the correct term in parenthesis or something right there under it's "easily understood" name for easy access. Otherwise, what are you actually learning? Seems like a missed opportunity to make a really good LEARNING book instead of just something that's funny.

How much of domain knowledge consists of acquiring vocabulary? This book demonstrates conclusively that the answer is "more than you might think." As a didactic exercise, this book is (mostly) a failure, but therein lies its value. You will emerge from reading this book with a newfound appreciation for the value of jargon and technical terminology. This book may appeal to people who enjoy crossword puzzles, because part of the fun is trying to figure what the author is referring to from his descriptions and drawings.

A good idea gone terribly complicated.

The book is coffee-table size and the print is so small that it makes reading an effort. In his endeavour to keep the language simple, the author/illustrator uses such simple words that the book becomes even more difficult to understand. I have no idea who this is targeted at - kids? Adults? Wannabe kids? I rifled through the book and left it at that ...I don't think I am ever going to read it! I should have been smarter - leafed through it in a bookstore and then bought it. Mr Bill Gates owes me some money! (I suspect the book became a bestseller only because of Mr Gates's recommendation!).

After he wrote "What If?" and the Up Goer Five, this book has lots of big things with lots of little words to tell us what they are and how they work. It is a very good book. I think it would be a very good idea for you all to read it. Learn about the bags of water that live inside you, the things that fire comes out of in the ground, and the pieces everything is made of, which we have a great big table for. Have fun!

This is probably most appreciated by people who understand the items well already or don't care to know the nitty gritty details about the things they don't understand well. It will NOT explain any technical jargon to you - that's kind of the point.
For example: I'm in medical school and really enjoyed reading about how a cell works and how the body works from a simplistic perspective. I even had to wonder what he was talking about a few times before I thought, "Ah, the pancreas. That is an interesting way of describing it."
I'm not an authority on the other items, but I still really enjoyed reading them. If I actually wanted to know details, I think it would be interesting to get a big picture view with Thing Explainer and then start googling prolifically to understand each item and put it into the larger picture.
I think a nice follow-up or article by Randall would be to include an explainer of the Thing Explainer. I'd probably give him more money for it - ha.

I bought this book for my brother as a gift and he loves it! The author uses the top 10000 most used English words to explain how many different things work and the makeup of many other different things. It's a neat way to help people understand complex things without using unnecessarily huge words.

I'm not really sure who will find this satisfying.

As an enduring fan of Randall's work, I find this book to be something of an oddity and, ultimately, a strike-out. I think it serves more to scratch a lifelong itch in the author than it does to further anyone's understanding of anything. He obviously takes great delight in rendering the world of the technical in such silly language... but I doubt most of the rest of us will. After 5 minutes with this book, I was bored.

As I understand it, the whole point of this work is to recreate the experience of again being a bright child, picking up technical books about how things work and marveling at the ingenuity of natural and human creation... while making the experience more accessible to people who don't yet have the capacity for technical vernacular.

Yet Randall seems to have forgotten his own bright childhood with such books, which obviously never deterred him. Any bright child interested in a subject will be able to tell you by age 7, 8 or 9 what a "jet propulsion engine" does or why a phone would contain an "accelerometer". Is Randall so condescending as to suggest that anyone would need to be talked down to in this way?

If this book is indeed intended for children, it lacks the content that would keep them coming back - colorful, detailed illustrations that warrant repeated scrutiny, or text full of fascinating new words that one has to ask an older person the meaning of. This book emphatically has neither. The illustrative style, which is so charmingly minimal and tongue-in-cheek in xkcd, falls flat here. Who wants to look at a poorly-sketched, oversimplified, insufficiently-described schematic of anything??

Randall knows what he's doing here, but I think he's missed a great opportunity to make something of real value. This could have been a truly useful, funny, educational book for people of all ages.

I think it only serves to reinforce the genius of books such as David Macaulay's 'The Way Things Work'. There, clearly, is a book with the right combination of detail, humor, accessibility and useful information to keep both kids and adults entertained (and educated) indefinitely. In comparison, Randall's 'Thing Explainer', with its infantile vocabulary and illustrations to match, has a very confused appeal indeed.

I think this book is destined to be a coffee-table oddity for smart adults, who will occasionally pick it up and smile to themselves about how clever Randall is. Basically, it's an adult joke that quickly wears thin, from a very clever person capable of much more. I can't read this as anything other than a disappointment.

I love Randall Munroe's style or drawing and humor and this one didn't disappoint. Sometimes I felt that his intentional use of non-technical words got in the way of understanding. It would have been nice if he paired the simple
Words with the technical words. Still a good find and worth a read

Even knowing that the concept of this book was to explain stuff in simple terms, I was still aggravated with the real product when I was flipping through it. The detailed drawings are wonderful but the notes about what you're looking at in them and the body text, are just too simplified. I love the XKCD comics and think that in many of those Munroe has done a better job of making difficult concepts easy to understand than he does here. The reality is that some complex topics need technical terms in order for their descriptions to make sense and when you try to describe these processes with only the 500 most common words, you actually lose some of the meaning. Book shelf owners beware: this is also a very tall book (over a foot tall).

I agree with the reviewers who lamented that by limiting himself to "ten hundred words", the author ruined this otherwise clever book. The reason I'm writing this review is to warn readers away from the Kindle version. On my iPad 3 and iPad Mini 4 running the latest versions of iOS (9.2.1) and the Kindle app (4.16.1), the diagrams exhibit artifacts (speckled bands) if you pinch-zoom in, and you *must* zoom in if you want to see the details in his drawings. At best these display artifacts are bad enough to ruin the pleasure of the book; at worst they make the drawings undecipherable, um, "not possible to understand".

This is an interesting concept for explaining how things work. The diagrams were very good. However, I felt, at least for me, that the terms for different items could be a little more expansive. For instance the author used "water" for most liquids except used "blood" for blood. "Oil" is a good descriptive term for oil but but the author replaced it by "water".

I only wish that the large foldout poster at the end was of the up-goer five instead of the high-rise tower. Randall makes a great book as always -- grab What If? while you are at it and of course get your thrice weekly dose of his web comic xkcd @xkcd.com ( and more "what if?")

Great book! Randall does an excellent job at explaining various objects that we all know and use. While the book is factual, it's not too serious. Randall has clearly had fun with the names and descriptions of items which makes for an enjoyable read. This is a great book for any engineer, geek, or technically inclined person you know. They will get a lot of enjoyment out of it and learn a lot in the process.

The author ,as he states, uses only a few words in his descriptions - the most commonly used and understood words. He, consequently, uses the same words to describe different things and processes -- Even within a single a "thing" (chapter). Discerning the differences between parts and defining their unique functions requires using at least enough words to accomplish the distinctions. This book is a great example of making things so simple they become confusing, and, therefore, useless for effectively communicating / teaching / learning perspectives. It is a short book - and a wasteful expenditure of time and money.

This book is very cool, but instead of the 1,000 most commonly used words at the end, a page indexed glossary would be great. I found it frustrating that if I wanted to know more about some explained elements (the parts of the cell for instance) I had no starting point to begin research.

I actually received two copies of this book this Christmas, one from each set of grandparents. In most cases, duplicate books get re-gifted to friends. However, this is definitely a book that I will keep both copies of - one to read, and one to read when the first copy eventually falls apart. I love the way it explains everything relatively simply while keeping the information in the book accurate. If I had books that taught like this in my early physics class, I might have done a lot better than I eventually did. Definitely worth buying if you are considering it.

I LOVED the What If book and ongoing xkcd series. I really enjoy learning things in simple terms I can understand. This book kinda explains things, but in an overly simplistic way actually circles back to being confusing! Like instead of rabbit it was a "long eared carrot muncher" (it wasn't exactly that but you get the point hopefully) Then the actual term was never used anyway. Additionally, the information feels disjointed, like I kinda understand what this does but why do we need it in the first place, how does it fit into the entire scheme of things- that is the best way I can describe it. I walked away feeling confused and frustrated that I didn't understand a lot of the subject matter.

Wonderfully written even if it is simple. It has the vocabulary of a 5 year old but something require higher comprehension because the things he will talk about will be very obtuse with simple language and you have to do some mental gymnastics to figure what he is on about. Some words like bedroom are part of the 1000 word vocabulary but he will label or describe them as bed room (two words) or sleeping room. If you love the comic, the book is on par. After reading it, I find myself using simpler words as well.

I wish there was a "Thing Explainer" translator, for when I have to take highly complex concepts and break them down into readily understandable, bite-sized morsels for other people to understand. We live in interesting times.

This was a gift for my husband, and it is very thorough and really interesting. It's a great coffee table book and a cool conversation starter. If you are interested in how things work, this is definitely a good book for you.