Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create accountThe perfect last-minute gift
Audiobook credit bundles can be delivered instantly, given worldwide, and support local bookstores!
Start giftingLimited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todayOn Looking
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreBookseller recommendation
“I stumbled upon this book and couldn’t be happier about it! So many aspects of modern life seem so mundane to us, that I’m often looked at like a crazy person when I talk about my enthusiasm for the magic of the airport or my love of driving or how I can go on for hours about book formatting and written language. When I found this title I was thrilled to find a set of essays looking deeper at the world around us, with fresh and knowledgeable eyes. On every walk around the block, most people miss most things! What kind of stone makes the buildings? What does the typeface of street signs tell us about the history of the street? What do we miss that our animals or children perceive from a lower perspective? This collection of essays was so enchanting that I started recommending it before I was even half finished. If you want new perspectives and fresh joys, I cannot recommend it enough. My whole world felt just a touch more wondrous after reading this book!”
— Jenna • Off the Beaten Path
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.
Alexandra Horowitz is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know; Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell; Our Dogs, Ourselves: The Story of a Singular Bond; and The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. She teaches at Barnard College, where she runs the Dog Cognition Lab. She lives with her family of Homo sapiens, Canis familiaris, and Felis catus in New York City.
Alexandra Horowitz is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know; Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell; Our Dogs, Ourselves: The Story of a Singular Bond; and The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. She teaches at Barnard College, where she runs the Dog Cognition Lab. She lives with her family of Homo sapiens, Canis familiaris, and Felis catus in New York City.
Featured in this playlist...
Audiobook details
Author:
Alexandra Horowitz
Narrator:
Alexandra Horowitz
ISBN:
9781442359345
Length:
8 hours 56 minutes
Language:
English
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication date:
January 8, 2013
Edition:
Unabridged
Libro.fm rank:
#10,697 Overall
Genre rank:
#194 in Environment & Nature