Randall Munroe is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller What If?, the science question-and-answer blog What If, and the popular webcomic xkcd. 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, 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.

Have you ever tried to read up on some incredible part of the world, only to find yourself faced with incomprehensible terminology and jargon? It’s nice to know what the parts of a thing are called, but it’s even more interesting to know what they do. What if you had something that could clearly explain it all using simple words?

Thing Explainer, by Randall Munroe, does just that. Using line drawings and only the thousand (or, rather, “ten hundred”) most common words, he provides simple explanations for some of the world’s most interesting things: our food-heating radio boxes (microwaves), our very tall roads (bridges), and our computer buildings (datacenters). He also explains 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? What would life be like without them? 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 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.