On Looking: A Walker's Guide to the Art of Observation

Alexandra Horowitz

ene 2013 · Simon and Schuster

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The #1 New York Times–bestselling author’s “elegant and entertaining” look at how humans perceive their environments—and what they’re missing (The Boston Globe).

In this eye-opening book, Alexandra Horowitz takes a series of simple walks—mostly through her Manhattan neighborhood—with experts on various subjects, including a sociologist, an artist, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer, as well as her own son. On each excursion, she shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary—to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, “the observation of trifles.”

By shining a light on what her companions see—as well as how they see it and why most of us do not see the same things—Horowitz reveals the startling power of human attention and the cognitive aspects of expert observation. With her background in cognitive science, she discovers a feast of fascinating detail, all explained with her generous humor and self-deprecating tone.

On Looking invites you to turn off the phone and be in the 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.

“[On Looking] 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

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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.