The Way Things Work Now. By
David Macaulay with Neil Ardley and Jack Challoner. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
$35.
There are few reference
books that need to be in a family’s library nowadays, because so much of what
kids – and parents – want or need to know is only a click or two away on the
Internet. This book, though, does belong on the shelf of any family with any
member with any sense of curiosity about just about anything. David Macaulay
has a thing about inward workings: his books on how buildings are constructed
and how they function, starting with Cathedral
and continuing through City, Castle
and others, are astonishingly detailed, beautifully conceived and executed, and
amazingly informative. In The Way Things
Work Now, a much-revised and much-updated version of The Way Things Work (1988) and The
New Way Things Work (1998), Macaulay, with assistance from Jack Challoner
and the late Neil Ardley, combines meticulously accurate descriptions of many,
many functions of many, many items with a highly amusing “framing tale” at
whose center is nothing less than a mammoth.
The mammoth inclusion is a
wonderful stroke that encourages young readers (and, to be honest, their
parents) to stick with material that could otherwise be, well, sticky – complex
and potentially, even in simplified form, difficult to understand. The
introductory pages of The Way Things Work
Now, for example, get right into matters such as kinetic, potential,
electric and chemical energy, heat and friction, and more. Lest any of this be
off-putting to readers, Macaulay includes along the bottom six scenes of a
mammoth doing some things that mammoths surely did not do, such as balancing on a wheel, swinging another (much smaller) mammoth around by its trunk, and
hopping up and down atop four springs attached to the bottoms of its four
feet. The mammoth’s expressions are
marvelous, with an air of wide-eyed innocence that beautifully complements the
text. And when readers finish the introduction and turn the page to get into
the meat of the book, the first thing they encounter is “the inclined plane,”
for which they get a sound scientific explanation along the bottom of two pages
with, along the pages’ top, a tongue-in-cheek discussion of using an inclined
plane to capture mammoths – thereby ending the “older” approach of building
towers from which to catch them, with the narrator explaining that as to the
towers, “I made a few more calculations and then suggested commercial and
retail development on the lower levels and luxury apartments above.”
Clearly The Way Things Work Now is a science book that does not take itself
too seriously – except that, well, yes, it does. Macaulay keeps the amusing
sidelights carefully separate from the serious analyses, except to the extent
that he uses mammoth matters to illustrate scientific principles, for instance
showing a befuddled-looking mammoth whose fur has been partly trimmed using an
electric trimmer (whose operation is accurately described next to the silly
picture). The machines shown in The Way
Things Work Now vary widely in complexity and are pictured in quite a few
different sizes, to make it easier to illustrate their mechanisms. Here too the
pictures complement the descriptions beautifully. Still in the section on
levers, for instance, there is an explanation of nail clippers, “a neat
combination of two levers that produce a strong cutting action while at the
same time being easy to control.” A nail clipper is shown from the perspective
of Lilliputians: little figures are about to pull down on its handle with a
stout rope while others guide a finger with over-long nail to the right spot
for clipping, and one figure gamely struggles to drags away a nail clipping
around which a rope has been tied to make its obviously heavy weight easier to
move.
Cleverness of this sort is
pervasive in The Way Things Work Now.
Indeed, it is a big reason the book is so attractive as well as useful. In 400
oversized pages, Macaulay covers five areas: “The Mechanics of Movement,”
“Harnessing the Elements,” “Working with Waves,” “Electricity &
Automation,” and “The Digital Domain.” The first part is where you will find
everything from the grand piano to the sewing machine to automotive seat belts.
The second part includes, among many other things, helicopters, hot-air
balloons, fire extinguishers, astronauts’ jet packs, and nuclear reactors –
with a look at how a fusion reactor might work if one could be devised. In the
third part are bulbs (including, in this updated version of the book, LED
lamps), microscopes, lasers, holograms (showing how one would make a
holographic mammoth), Blu-ray players (again, an addition to earlier versions
of the book), earphones (showing the Mona Lisa using them), and (another new
element) smartphones. The fourth part explains batteries, photocopiers,
electric motors, car ignition systems, radar, security scanners and much more.
The fifth section, whose material will be the most familiar to many young
readers even though they may not have the faintest idea how any of it actually
performs its functions, includes the computer mouse and keyboard, touchscreen,
digitized images and sound, video-game controllers, hard disks, barcodes, the
Internet and World Wide Web (not the same thing!), and more.
At the very end of The Way Things Work Now is a section
called “The Invention of Machines” that, although not necessary to understand
how machines work, has its own fascination in explaining where common ones came
from – when, how and by whom they were invented. This section is filled with
delightful trivia: can openers as we know them were invented a century later
than the cans they open; the zipper was created in 1891 but not named until
1926; metal screws were in use by 1556, but the screwdriver was not invented
until 1780; and much more. What Macaulay manages here, with the same skill
shown in his books about architecture, is to explain hard-to-understand
operations in ways that are clear but do not come across as talking down to
readers or “dumbing down” the concepts themselves. There have been other books
doing similar things – the best recent one, by far, is Randall Munroe’s Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple
Words. But what distinguishes The Way
Things Work Now is that it explains simple
stuff, or at least apparently simple stuff, as well as matters of considerable
complexity; and all the explanations can be followed by young readers as well
as adults -- the vocabulary, while not overly easy, is forthright enough for
that. Pulling all this together into so informative and interesting a volume
was obviously a, ahem, mammoth undertaking. The result is wonderfully
entertaining as well as exceptionally useful, the sort of book for which
Internet access is simply no substitute.
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