We all have one, that person we'd prefer to get along with, but every time they open their mouth, so much stupid erupts that low-level irritation shifts into rage (there's a certain political figure that I react to every time).That about sums up my experience with Thing Explainer.Every time I picked it up intending to read a few 'cartoons' explaining concepts like helicopters, the cell, elevators or the auto engine, I'd end up either generally annoyed or quite specifically angry. Thing Explainer...

Thanks to Giulio for this wonderful Christmas gift. It's been great fun to read and I think I understand some rather complicated things that I had no clue about before. Great coffee table book.(Still pondering whether or not my G. thinks I'm stupid.)

Thing Explainer is a book about how things work but only using the most common words in the English language. Randall Munroe, the author of the book, intentionally use simplified words to give equivalents or to explain, which is here and there a bit confusing. The idea is that if you truly understand something you can break it down into simple words enough for anyone to understand.Thing explainer is also written with a sarcastic sense of humour and it includes some lighter comics, as well as, wi...

I have been a long time fan of xkcd, a delightfully nerdy and funny webcomic that has a wonderful mix of science, humor, and the occasional pun. If you like science and humor and aren't reading xkcd you need to zip on over there stat.When I heard that Munroe, the artist/writer of xkcd, announced he was going to put out a book explaining things using his simple, yet elegant art style, I was excited. Here was a person who knew science, had a passion for educating the masses about it, and had a sub...

This book: read it.Randall Munroe never ever fails to make me laugh. Having been indoctrinated to "internet humor" at a very young age (okay, so like, my late teens) with xkcd, I was entirely thrilled to learn about What If? being released some nine years after that, and that's still one of the funniest books I've ever read. I wrote a long-form book review about it for my library's newsletter. It's really that good.Thing Explainer is just as good (I hesitate to use the word "better" for two reas...

Worth it even just for the credit given on the Acknowledgements page: HELPERSA lot of people helped me with this book. Their namesaren’t words that people use a lot, but I’m going towrite them anyway because they’re important.(...)And, most of all, Strong Pretty Ring-Wearer It was funny! Even if you couldn't learn anything from it, I think it's worth reading just to see how much more fun and approachable the English language is if we don't gussy it up too much. The ten hundred words list. I...

First off, explaining complex things like the ISS (that's that big thing in the sky, not the men with beards who want to kill you), nuclear reactors, etc using only the most popular 1,000 words in English is one helluva feat, and Randall needs to be lauded for doing that. But...The novelty wears off pretty quickly; it is after all possible to dumb down science too much. The other problem is one of semantics. As I said, it's a great job explaining everything using only a vocabulary of 1,000 words...

I am alternately astounded and unsurprised by my fellow Goodreads reviewers.This is a book where the title on the front is labeled "Big Words That Tell You What This Book Is." The inside dust jacket informs you that it uses only the thousand most common words, and even gives you examples like:* food-heating radio boxes (microwaves)* the big flat rocks we live on (tectonic plates)* the bags of stuff inside you (human organs) . . . and yet reviews complain about this exact premise. I mean, the

Randall Munroe's XKCD comic is a delight to read, "What If" was fabulous, so I was expecting something even more from "Thing Explainer". Extremely disappointed. By utilizing only the 1,000 most common words to write this book Munroe created a confusing mess. The simplistic language created a moment or two of cheeky comedy, but for the most part it was a confusing (in the most annoying sense of the term) way to have complex ideas explained. Just call it "Mitochondria" and then talk about how it's...

Strolling through a book store I spotted this and was intrigued by the the interesting diagrams, topics examined and premise of "complicated stuff in simple words". To my surprise it ended up on the best seller list with the appropriate discount so I snatched it up with an Xmas gift card. Wish I had paid attention to the "simple words" part since I should have looked a bit more closely. Turns out the words are, IMHO, too simple. They are drawn from the list of the thousand (sorry "ten hundred" i...

Munroe is inspirational for educators who struggle to make complex concepts accessible. I've run into this problem when trying to create fliers to describe, simply and succinctly, the process that you use to check out ebooks from the library. It feels like an impossible task. Munroe shows in this clever book, that anything is possible. From Lifting Rooms (elevators) to Our Star (the sun), Munroe takes it all apart and explains the processes with only ten hundred (1000!) of the most commonly used...

I loved the German translation so much that I had to buy the English edition too... and, of course, it was better. The book has such an excellent idea that I only really thought about that when I read it in German, but in the original you can see what a poet Munroe is, and poetry never really translates quite right. Here are some of my favorite passages:SHAPE CHECKERThis machine checks whether you have a piece of metal with a certain shape. If you do, it lets go of whatever it's holding on to. P...

Awesome, of course.My star sign is "water animal with hand cutters"And I've always wanted a pet "skin bird."

Disappointed. "Complicated stuff in simple words" is right. I actually wanted to learn something from this book, but when nothing is given its proper name it gets super confusing. For instance sky boat with turning wings is a helicopter. The parts are labeled as such: land feet, radio stick, spin changer, pointing wings, end blower, etc etc. Funny, yes. For the first 3 pages. If you are not an engineer and want to grasp the basics with proper nomenclature look elsewhere.

This book explains 47 hard things using only “the ten hundred most used words” and simple pictures. My job is to explain hard things so they sound easy, so I used the Thing Explain word check to explain a thing that way: Hands, face, spaceThere is lots of a new tiny bad thing in the air. It started in animals far away but got into people.When it gets inside people, it makes many of them sick and some die. The sick people breathe hard, fast, with pain and noise, so the new tiny bad thing moves i...

This book by the author of the comic xkcd is kind of stunning. It's amazing the amount of understanding he distilled into informative and approachable drawings. I got tired of the 1,000-word schtick (the author only uses the 1,000 most common words in the English language, so e.g. helicopters are called "sky boats with turning wings"), though it's admittedly impressive. This would be a great book for a grade school STEM student, a nerd with a coffee table, or someone who just really likes to rea...

I really enjoyed this book! (Thanks Kathy!) I will fully admit that I wished for the real names of things to be used, and then explained in simple words, but I still got a kick out of this book. I love Munroe's take on the "Explain Like I'm 5" challenge. I now know things, though I'm not sure that it would help me much, for instance, to tell the doctor that my food bag is upset and grumbling. He might refer me to another kind of doctor, one who would make me look at sneeze images made from many

One can see how this would easily be a fun exercise, trying to explain some complicated “things” using only the limited set of the “ten hundred” or so most commonly used words in the language. This, along with the xkcd-honed drawing skills, can convert what would otherwise have been quite a nondescript mini-encyclopedia into a quaint and publishable book. Munroe’s cult following, wit, and knack for packaging a book beautifully, makes it a bestseller (?). But as far as reading it is concerned, th...

Beautiful helpful diagrams constrained by a contrived vocabulary limit.