An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

If many of our favorite recent nature books celebrate the complex and often surprising intelligences of particular organisms—trees, mushrooms, octopuses, birds—Yong's new book is like a sense-by-sense encyclopedia of such wonders, altering and expanding our understanding of the world around us by showing it through the eyes, ears, noses, and many far stranger instruments of dozens of the animals we share the planet with. From the hundred primitive eyes a scallop uses to scan its surroundings, to the star-nosed mole's fingerlike appendage, to the bumblebees that detect not only ultraviolet markings on flowers invisible to us but also their electrical fields, Yong (who somehow wrote this book while also being the Atlantic's Pulitzer-winning COVID correspondent) does indeed make the world seem immense, full of patterns and languages we can't sense, and which our noisy, bright civilization often unwittingly obliterates. Your eyes (and ears and nose, etc.) will widen in appreciation on every page.