An Immense World
by Ed Yong
GENRE: Nonfiction, Nature, Science
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.”
Author Biography
Ed Yong is a British-American science journalist, a Pulitzer winner, and the author of two bestselling books.
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, and was described as “the most important and impactful journalist of 2020” by Poynter.
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 the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize; it was also a finalist for four other major awards, and was ranked 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.
Ed was a staff writer at the Atlantic from 2015 to 2023. Prior to that, his 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. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024.
Ed is a proud member of Liminal—a science communication collective focused on sense-making, which was co-founded by his wife Liz Neeley. Liminal’s approach to science communication is deeply personal, politically engaged, and massively multidisciplinary. Through coaching, training, and collaborations, the collective makes science communication make sense to scientists, to help science make sense for everyone.
Ed cares deeply about empathetic, accurate, nuanced, and curiosity-driven reporting. Through his journalism, he tries to not only describe what is happening but also help people make sense of it, to bear witness to suffering, to speak truth to power, to reveal wonder in the obscure, and to push for a more just and equitable world. He has written about the origin of life itself and the modern-day extinction crisis; the way science is conducted and the scientists who are fighting to make it more reliable and inclusive; the people who are still suffering from the the long-lasting consequences of viral infections and the societal forces that said infections reveal and exploit; and the invisible microbes that profoundly shape our lives and the impercetible information that other animals can detect with their amazing senses.
He is married to Liz Neeley, founder of Liminal Creations, and is parent to Typo, a corgi. They live in Oakland, California. - Author's website
Reviews
Publisher's Weekly
/* Starred Review */ 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. (July) --Staff (Reviewed 05/30/2022) (Publishers Weekly, vol 269, issue 23, p)
Kirkus
/* Starred Review */ 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. (Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2022)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
The Hidden Life of Trees
by Peter Wohlleben
Are trees social beings? In The Hidden Life of Trees forester and author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration that he has observed in his woodland.
Sentient
by Jackie Higgins
There is a scientific revolution stirring in the field of human perception. Research has shown that the extraordinary sensory powers of our animal friends can help us better understand the same powers that lie dormant within us.
From the harlequin mantis shrimp with its ability to see a vast range of colors, to the bloodhound and its hundreds of millions of scent receptors; from the orb-weaving spider whose eyes recognize not only space but time, to the cheetah whose ears are responsible for its perfect agility, these astonishing animals hold the key to better understanding how we make sense of the world around us.
The End of Eden
by Adam Welz
The stories we usually tell ourselves about climate change tend to focus on the damage inflicted on human societies by big storms, severe droughts, and rising sea levels. But the most powerful impacts are being and will be felt by the natural world and its myriad species, which are already in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Rising temperatures are fracturing ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve, disrupting the life forms they sustain--and in many cases driving them towards extinction. The natural Eden that humanity inherited is quickly slipping away.
Although we can never really know what a creature thinks or feels, The End of Eden invites the reader to meet wild species on their own terms in a range of ecosystems that span the globe. Combining classic natural history, firsthand reportage, and insights from cutting-edge research, Adam Welz brings us close to creatures like moose in northern Maine, parrots in Puerto Rico, cheetahs in Namibia, and rare fish in Australia as they struggle to survive. The stories are intimate yet expansive and always dramatic.
An exquisitely written and deeply researched exploration of wild species reacting to climate breakdown, The End of Eden offers a radical new kind of environmental journalism that connects humans to nature in a more empathetic way than ever before and galvanizes us to act in defense of the natural world before it's too late.