From the dust jacket: The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world.

In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.

Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.”

Promised to GoryDetails in the Wish List Tag game.

This book presents a lot of information! I will never remember it all, but it has certainly awakened in me a new appreciation for the different points of view that animals have. I will look and listen more closely in the future.

The last chapter, unfortunately, brings it all together and tells us how humans are screwing up everything. It is frustrating.

Hope you enjoy the book, GoryDetails!

This hefty hardcover arrived safely today; many thanks!

Later: An intriguing deep-dive into the different ways that living creatures sense the world around them, including some that we share with other types of creatures - and several that I wouldn't have thought of, like electric fields. And there were other fascinating entries, including the chapter on pain, "The Unwanted Sense", which distinguishes between nociception - the neurological processes and pathways that register pain - and the experience of pain itself. (This chapter featured the naked mole-rat, one of the most unusual creatures on the planet - a mammal that lives more like hive-insects, and which has its own very unusual sensory capabilities re things that would be painful to most beings.)

Since the book does rely on various experiments that demonstrate how different senses work, there are some uncomfortable bits - but there are also passages of great beauty, with the photograph sections displaying the sensory apparatus of many things from insects to large mammals.

The final chapter is on "threatened sensescapes," whether polluted by chemical odors or too much light or other things - and describes how these affect us as well as wildlife.

Fascinating book!

I left this book in the Little Free Library on this windy day; hope someone enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in NH here.]

Released for:

** 2024 4 Elements challenge **

** 2024 Keep Them Moving challenge. **