From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog and The Year of the Puppy, this “elegant and entertaining” (The Boston Globe) explanation of how humans perceive their environments “does more than open our eyes...opens our hearts and minds, too, gently awakening us to a world—in fact, many worlds—we’ve been missing” (USA TODAY).
Alexandra Horowitz shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary—to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, “the observation of trifles.” Structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, On Looking features experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. Horowitz also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it. What they see, how they see it, and why most of us do not see the same things reveal the startling power of human attention and the cognitive aspects of what it means to be an expert observer.
Page by page, Horowitz shows how much more there is to see—if only we would really look. Trained as a cognitive scientist, she discovers a feast of fascinating detail, all explained with her generous humor and self-deprecating tone. So turn off the phone and other electronic devices and be in the real world—where strangers communicate by geometry as they walk toward one another, where sounds reveal shadows, where posture can display humility, and the underside of a leaf unveils a Lilliputian universe—where, indeed, there are worlds within worlds within worlds.
Emily
2023-08-09
While it's likely not a book for everyone, seeing that it has a very rich vocabulary that can sometimes be tricky (especially for myself who's bilingual) to understand, the book is exceptional. Every walk has such a distinctive path on where to look, what to look at and as I used this audio book on my own walks to and from my bus (30ish minutes each way) I had the pleasure to look at things on my own walk a little differently. For those who ever is struck at the thought of "what do people see that I don't", listen/read the book, even if it isn't about anything in your neighbourhood, you'll be surprised and pleased with how much more you see, smell and hear when you have a hunch of what to look for.
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