An Immense World

Description

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 previously unfathomable dimensions – the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.

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 humans that 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 which lie unsolved.

In An Immense World, author and acclaimed science journalist 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. Because in order to understand our world we don’t need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.

Ed Yong

Ed Yong is a British-American science journalist. He reports for The Atlantic, and is based in Washington, DC.

For his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ed won the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism; the George Polk Award for science reporting; the Benton Award for distinguished public service; the Victor Cohn Prize for medical science reporting, the Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for investigative journalism; the John P. McGovern Award from the American Medical Writers’ Association; and the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for in-depth reporting. He was also a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award in public service.

He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers—AN IMMENSE WORLD, about the extraordinary sensory worlds of other animals; and I CONTAIN MULTITUDES, about the amazing partnerships between animals and microbes. An Immense World won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and was listed as one of the top books of the year by the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, the Economist, People, Barack Obama, and more than 30 other lists.

Prior to joining the Atlantic, Ed’s writing also featured in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and other publications. He regularly does talks and interviews, and his TED talk on mind-controlling parasites has been watched by over 1.9 million people. His work has appeared in three editions of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, which he then guest-edited in 2021.

You can read more about his work on his website edyong.me and follow him on twitter @edyong209