On Looking: a Walker'S Guide to the Art of Observation

Name: On Looking: a Walker'S Guide to the Art of Observation
Brand: Does not apply
SKU: 1439191263
Price: 27.40 USD
Availability: InStock

$27.40 USD

Sale Sold out

On Looking: a Walker'S Guide to the Art of Observation

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 Horowitzshows 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.

Publisher	Scribner
Dimensions	5.75 x 0.81 x 8.75 inches
Language	English
Print length	324 pages
Item Weight	2.31 pounds
Edition	Reprint
ISBN-10	1439191263
ISBN-13	978-1439191262
Publication date	April 15, 2014