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An immense world : how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us / Ed Yong.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Random House, [2022]Copyright date: ©2022Edition: First editionDescription: x, 449 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly color), charts ; 25 cmContent type:
  • text
  • still image
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780593133231
  • 0593133234
Subject(s):
Contents:
The only true voyage -- Leaking sacks of chemicals : smells and tastes -- Endless ways of seeing : light -- Rurple, grurple, yurple : color -- The unwanted sense : pain -- So cool : heat -- A rough sense : contact and flow -- The rippling ground : surface vibrations -- All ears : sound -- A silent world shouts back : echoes -- Living batteries : electric fields -- They know the way : magnetic fields -- Every window at once : uniting the senses -- Save the quiet, preserve the dark : threatened sensescapes.
Summary: "The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires (and fireworks), songbirds that can see the Earth's magnetic fields, and brainless jellyfish that nonetheless have complex eyes. 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, and that even fingernail-sized spiders can make out the craters of the moon. We meet people with unusual senses, from women who can make out extra colors to blind individuals who can navigate using reflected echoes like bats. Yong tells the stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, and also looks ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved"-- Provided by publisher.
List(s) this item appears in: 2024 FPL Reading Challenge: Award Winning Read
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Dr. James Carlson Library NonFiction 591.5 Y55 Available 33111011075773
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 591.5 Y55 Available 33111010857619
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A "thrilling" ( The New York Times ), "dazzling" ( The Wall Street Journal ) tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world that will fill you with wonder and forever alter your perspective, by Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong

"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

Includes bibliographical references (pages 385-429) and index.

The only true voyage -- Leaking sacks of chemicals : smells and tastes -- Endless ways of seeing : light -- Rurple, grurple, yurple : color -- The unwanted sense : pain -- So cool : heat -- A rough sense : contact and flow -- The rippling ground : surface vibrations -- All ears : sound -- A silent world shouts back : echoes -- Living batteries : electric fields -- They know the way : magnetic fields -- Every window at once : uniting the senses -- Save the quiet, preserve the dark : threatened sensescapes.

"The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires (and fireworks), songbirds that can see the Earth's magnetic fields, and brainless jellyfish that nonetheless have complex eyes. 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, and that even fingernail-sized spiders can make out the craters of the moon. We meet people with unusual senses, from women who can make out extra colors to blind individuals who can navigate using reflected echoes like bats. Yong tells the stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, and also looks ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved"-- Provided by publisher.

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