“One of this year’s finest works of narrative nonfiction.”—Oprah Daily
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time, People, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, Reader’s Digest, Chicago Public Library, Outside, Publishers Weekly, BookPage
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Oprah Daily, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist, Smithsonian Magazine, Prospect (UK), Globe & Mail, Esquire, Mental Floss, Marginalian, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal
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.”
WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON AWARD
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Release date
June 21, 2022 -
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Kindle Book
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- ISBN: 9780593133248
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- ISBN: 9780593133248
- File size: 28124 KB
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- English
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Reviews
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Library Journal
February 1, 2022
In Race and Reckoning, Cose (The Rage of a Privileged Class) argues that throughout U.S. history racial bias has always shaped key decisions and events (25,000-copy first printing). Ten years in the making, journalist Fairbanks's The Inheritors follows three everyday South Africans over five decades to reveal how the end of apartheid unfolded. From Hager, historian-in-residence at the Presidential Pet Museum, All-American Dogs is organized by historical era to chronicle the 31 U.S. presidents who have kept canines within petting distance at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (100,000-copy first printing; four-color illustrations). Ranging from the early 1800s to the early 2000s, Livingstone reveals the manifold accomplishments of The Women of Rothschild (40,000-copy first printing). In Code Gray, ER physician Nahvi highlights the daily ethical questions faced by doctors in his position (50,000-copy first printing). In Nerd, New York Times critic at large Phillips, who writes about theater and poetry as well as film, shows how pop-culture fan favorites from Star Wars to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Doctor Who have shaped her--and have much to tell us about society at large (50,000-copy first printing). A multi-award-winning British author who specializes in French history and culture--his biographies of Hugo, Rimbaud, and Balzac were all New York Times Best Books--Robb now gives us France from Gaulish times 'til COVID-19. Journalist-turned-money manager Steinmetz (The Richest Man Who Ever Lived) introduces us to an American Rascal--Jay Gould, richer than Rockefeller or even Croesus and the reason Wall Street's first financial reforms were instituted (50,000-copy first printing). Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling science writer Yong reveals how animals other than humans perceive their surroundings in An Immense World.
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Publisher's Weekly
Starred review from May 30, 2022
Pulitzer-winning journalist Yong (I Contain Multitudes) reveals in this eye-opening survey animals’ world through their own perceptions. Every animal is “enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble,” he writes, or its own “perceptual world.” Yong’s tour covers vision (mantis shrimp have “12 photoreceptor classes”), sound (birds, researchers suggest, hear in a similar range as humans but they hear faster), and nociception, the tactile sense that sends danger signals (which is so widespread that it exists among “creatures separated by around 800 million years of evolution”). There are a wealth of other senses outside the standard five: sea turtles have two magnetic senses, electric fish generate currents to “sense their surroundings” as well as to communicate with each other, and the platypus’s sensitive bill gives it what scientists think may be “electrotouch.” Yong ends with a warning against light and sound pollution, which can confuse and disturb animals’ lives, and advocation that “natural sensescapes” ought to be preserved and restored. He’s a strong writer and makes a convincing case against seeing the world as only humans do: “By giving in to our preconceptions, we miss what might be right in front of us. And sometimes what we miss is breathtaking.” This is science writing at its best. -
Booklist
Starred review from May 15, 2022
In I Contain Multitudes (2016), science writer Yong exquisitely explored the teeniest domains of life, microbiomes. Now he sets his sights on sensory biology and animal behavior. Umwelt is the term used to describe the distinctive sensory experience of any particular creature. The "sensecapes" of different animals can be dominated not just by vision, smell, taste, touch, or sound but also heat, flow, and even magnetoreception. The menagerie of critters and their unique perceptual abilities Yong examines here include the platypus with a bill that detects electric fields, sand scorpions that rely on surface vibrations to hunt prey, the echolocation prowess of bats and dolphins, the ultrafast vision of killer flies, and the outstanding olfaction of elephants. The facts are frequently astonishing. For example, the majority of insects appear to be deaf. Pain is referred to as the "unwanted sense," and naked mole-rats are relatively impervious to some types of it. Yong's writing is empathetic, impeccably researched, imaginative, and entertaining. The tongue of a slithering rattlesnake "turns the world into both map and menu" whereas catfish are depicted as Daliesque "swimming tongues." Yong worries about humanity's "ecological sins," as sensory pollution--noise, night lighting, chemicals--is ubiquitous. Yong's scientific curiosity and concern for the natural world are contagious. This is "sense"-ational reading.COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Kirkus
Starred review from May 1, 2022
An ingenious account of how living organisms perceive the world. In his 1974 essay, "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?" philosopher Thomas Nagel argued that other animals experience a world utterly foreign to us, one nearly impossible to describe. In this follow-up to I Contain Multitudes, Yong, a staff reporter for the Atlantic who won a Pulitzer in 2021 for his reporting on Covid-19, mostly follows the traditional popular science format (travel the world, interview experts), but he takes a different, realistic, and utterly fascinating approach, emphasizing that every organism perceives only a tiny slice of the world accessible to its senses. A tick searching for blood is exquisitely sensitive to body heat, the touch of hair, and the odor of butyric acid from skin. The tick doesn't willfully ignore the surrounding plants and animals; it doesn't know that they exist. This involves the zoological term umwelt, the German word for environment that refers to what an animal can sense: its perceptual world. The human umwelt includes excellent vision, tolerable hearing, mediocre smell (but better than dog enthusiasts claim), some chemical sensitivity (mostly in the nose and taste buds), a touch of echolocation, and no ability to detect electromagnetic fields. In a dozen chapters, Yong delivers entertaining accounts of how animals both common and exotic sense the world as well as the often bizarre organs that enable them to do so. "There are animals with eyes on their genitals, ears on their knees, noses on their limbs, and tongues all over their skin," writes the author. "Starfish see with the tips of their arms, and sea urchins with their entire bodies. The star-nosed mole feels around with its nose, while the manatee uses its lips." Building on Aristotle's traditional five senses, Yong adds expert accounts of 20th-century discoveries of senses for echoes, electricity, and magnetism as well as perceptions we take for granted, including color, pain, and temperature. One of the year's best popular natural histories.COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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