On Looking

By: Alexandra Horowitz

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.”

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Book Description

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.

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