David Macaulay: Drawing to Explain the ‘How’ and the ‘Why’

About this video

David Macaulay is perhaps best known for his award-winning international bestseller The Way Things Work. This highly accessible, visual guide to the workings of machines was dubbed “a superb achievement” by the New York Times. A new, almost completely updated version, The New Way Things Work, was released in 2016, with all new sections on the technology that most impacts our everyday lives today.

Macaulay’s detailed illustrations and sly humor have earned him fans of all ages. His books have sold more than three million copies in the United States alone, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages. His many awards include the Caldecott Medal and Honor Awards, the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, the Christopher Award, and the Washington Post Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award. He was a two-time nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and received the Bradford Washburn Award, presented by the Museum of Science in Boston to an outstanding contributor to science.

In 2006 Macaulay was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, given “to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations.” As “an individual of distinction in the field of children’s literature,” Macaulay delivered the esteemed 2008 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, an honor bestowed on him by the American Library Association.