An Immense World (Ed Yong)
Early Review
This review is the initial impression of our editorial team after reading approximately one-tenth of the book.
DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed in the Early Review might not necessarily have a correlation with the Final Review of the book.
Popular Science has a new storyteller and one who can
weave a mesmerizing labyrinth of the banal and even the often neglected aspects of our existence.
The leitmotif of his book is an organism's Umwelt --- its 'sensory bubble' or 'perceptual world' ---
is both poetic and a recursively hypnotic narrative technique. If Carl Sagan was a master of
storytelling about the cosmos, Yong is his successor in the hidden sensory realms around us.
He compares tremendous olfactory capabilities of dogs to that of humans in a fascinating way
only to debunk the myth that scientific basis for such comparison can be misleading. The vivid
description of how crucial pheromones are to the ant's existence makes it almost unputdownable and
you find yourself fighting the urge to sleep even at 2 am in the morning. One can almost visualise
his lines being read in a documentary with David Attenborough's voiceover. This is his first book,
but at the risk of sounding repetitive, like Sagan, Yong evokes the impulse to rush through his book
only to pick up his next, or as in the latter case, his previous one. It is difficult to retain the
reader's interest, more so, in the popular science genre. For the sake of popular science, one can
only hope that the rest of the book matches up to expectations, but, intuitively, it almost seems
that Yong has mastered the art of exceeding expectations quite consistently.
Original Title : An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
ISBN : 0593133234 (ISBN13: 9780593133231)
Edition language : English
Literary Awards:Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Nonfiction (2022)
Published : 21 June 2022
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, 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.