The recap
Every animal lives inside its own sensory bubble, perceiving just a sliver of what surrounds it. Ed Yong builds his book around this idea, which biologists call the umwelt, and invites readers to step outside their own. Chapter by chapter he takes up a different sense, from smell, sight and touch to heat, pain, hearing, echolocation and the ability to detect electric and magnetic fields, and asks what the world might feel like to a creature that depends on it. We meet animals that see colors we cannot picture, hear in ranges we cannot reach and sense the planet's magnetism, along with the researchers who design ingenious experiments to find out. Yong writes with infectious curiosity, humor and humility, and he is careful to separate what is known from what is still guesswork. He also considers how human light and noise are crowding these hidden worlds. The book quietly changes how you see a dog on a walk, a bee in a garden or a spider in the corner of a room.
Why read it
For animal lovers, nature watchers and anyone who enjoys having their sense of reality gently turned inside out. No science background is needed, just curiosity.
Fun facts
- 01
The New York Times named it one of the 10 Best Books of 2022.
- 02
It won the 2023 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize and the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
- 03
Its central idea, the umwelt, comes from the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, who described it in the early twentieth century.
- 04
Yong had already won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic for The Atlantic.
