David Macaulay, America's "Explainer-in-chief"

Confession: I'm just mad about the mammoth, the one that wandered out of the Ice Age into one of author-illustrator David Macaulay's books – where he found his purpose in life (if that's a mammoth thing) helping Macaulay explain the way things work to kids."I was desperate to find a humorous way of explaining levers," said Macaulay, who realized levers have probably been around for a long time."So, I put the mammoth on the end of the log, and put the log on the rock to have a fulcrum, and the villagers on this end of the lever.

The problem that had to be solved was, what does the mammoth weigh? So, it's as simple as that!"Since it came out in 1988, "The Way Things Work" has sold more than a million copies around the world.Mammoth (and a whole herd of his friends) have made their way into other Macaulay books as well.Asked how many mammoths he thinks he's drawn, Macaulay replied, "It's like 43,272, I believe.

That's just a guess."With or without the help of mammoths, but always with a sense of humor, Macaulay has come to be known as "America's Explainer-in-chief." He is a multi-award-winning star in the children's picture book world and a Macarthur "genius grant" recipient, having explained all kinds of things in more than two dozen books over the course of his 50+ year career: the human body … cathedrals … castles … toilets … the pyramids … ships … the city of Rome."I miss Rome," he said.

"I think about it often, and I think about particular streets and places in Rome."As an architecture student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Macaulay spent a year there.Born in England, he moved to the United States at the age of ten with his family.An ongoing exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., explores the messiness of creating a book.

It is toplined, literally, as chaos: "Chaos, that's where this process started, and in fact it's where all my books start," he said."This whole thing [depicts] the inside of my brain, an...