On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz
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 a professor at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York, where she teaches psychology, animal behavior, and canine cognition. She earned her Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of California, San Diego, and has studied humans, narwhals, bonobos, and dogs. She worked as a Lexikographin at Merriam-Webster and for the New Yorker before starting her academic career. She frequently travels to New York City with her husband, the writer Ammon Shea, her son, and two large dogs who do not accompany her to Fu. Horowitz is the author of the New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog (deutsch: What Does a Dog Think?) and proves with her second book that she is one of the most astute observers of our infinitely complicated world.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781439191262 |
| ISBN 10 | 1439191263 |
| Title | On Looking |
| Author | Alexandra Horowitz |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Scribner Book Company |
| Year published | 2014-04-15 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |