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    On Looking: About Everything There is to See
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    On Looking: About Everything There is to See
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    On Looking: About Everything There is to See
    Ebook368 pages5 hours

    On Looking: About Everything There is to See

    By Alexandra Horowitz

    3.5/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    You are missing at least eighty percent of what is happening around you right now. You are missing what is happening in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. In marshalling your attention to these words, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses.

    This ignorance is useful: indeed, we compliment it and call it concentration. It enables us to not just notice the shapes on the page, but to absorb them as intelligible words, phrases, ideas. Alas, we tend to bring this focus to every activity we do. In so doing, it is inevitable that we also bring along attention's companion: inattention to everything else.

    This book begins with that inattention. It is not a book about how to bring more focus to your reading of Tolstoy; it is not about how to multitask, attending to two or three or four tasks at once. It is not about how to avoid falling asleep at a public lecture, or at your grandfather's tales of boyhood misadventures. It is about attending to the joys of the unattended, the perceived 'ordinary'. Even when engaged in the simplest of activities - taking a walk around the block - we pay so little attention to most of what is right before us that we are sleepwalkers in our own lives. This book is about that walk around the block, and how to rediscover the extraordinary things that we are missing in our ordinary activities.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster UK
    Release dateJan 17, 2013
    ISBN9781471126222
    Unavailable
    On Looking: About Everything There is to See
    Author

    Alexandra Horowitz

    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.

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    Reviews for On Looking

    3.5/5

    123 ratings24 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A wonderful book.
    • 1/5
      My comments are for the audio version. And in theory I'm not sure about rating a book that I didn't finish. But if others are considering this I can not recommend the audio version. The narrator is so uninspiring. Generally, the author does a good job of making a potentially interesting topic boring beyond belief. The first "walk" is with her 19 month toddler. She is obviously totally involved in her child's cuteness, but I found descriptions of her impressions of her child's experience of the world tedious at best. Maybe the text version could hold more interest for some, but I won't be seeking it out.
    • 3/5
      If you want some guidance on how to view the world around you differently, then pick up a copy of this book. The author took walks through NYC with experts in different fields and learned to see the city through their eyes: one expert looks at the stone used to construct the buildings and sees archeological imprints. Another expert studies fonts and can tell when a sign was constructed (and if modifications have been made since). Still another looks at the people and can decipher what ails the person by the way the people walk. The author even writes a section from her dogs point of view (heavily based on how the city smells). This book is a great exercise in different perspectives. Who we are colors our view of the world, and seldom do we think that others may see the same things so very differently - and yet we're all "correct in" what we see.
    • 4/5
      I was a bit disappointed as it was not the book that I had expected, I thought that there would be more about walking and with just some minor changes most of the walking could have been cut out of the book. It is a mixture of stories/observations/facts that are loosely tied together by the walking theme. In some ways it is part Oliver Sacks and part amateurish writing. In its own way it is an interesting mashup of various themes that just did not appeal to me; though I am sure many people will enjoy this book. Give it a try.
    • 3/5
      This is an interesting take on how we are aware of the world around us.
    • 4/5
      Wonderful set of essays on human perception. The essays delve into several areas of expertise as expertise influences perception. I want to read a bit more by the author!
    • 4/5
      Fantastic! The author does a great job of sampling many different sciences to give the layman or -woman a new way of perceiving the ordinary environment. I turned down a lot of pages with new terms, funny moments, and interesting facts. For example: a thigmotaxic animal is one who likes keeping in contact with something as it travels, as mice like to travel along walls for orientation. I would never have consciously sought out information on mice traveling habits, but Horowitz is great at unraveling the things she discovers on her walks with subject experts as a detective novel might. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      This was a fun book even though it wasn't quite what I had expected it to be. Alexandra took 11 walks, I think, with a variety of specialists, in an attempt to try to SEE the things she had been missing in her daily walks. Her eyes were opened to a lot of things.As I watched it, I was driving on a road trip. Elijah was listening in for part of the book. At that time, she was walking with a blind woman, and then with a sound specialist. The things she learned and taught us about on those walks were particularly meaningful to Elijah and were even related to things that he had been telling me about, as he is very interested in music and sound. That was fun.
    • 2/5
      I received this a a goodreads first-read giveaway. The premise of the book is extremely interesting but unfortunately, in reality the actual book was not. I found that instead of just being immersed in the minutia as seen through different people eyes, I was constantly being interrupted with a lecture. For example, I would have loved to go on a walk with a toddler and just see what he saw. Instead, I only got a bit of that and a lot of sociology and development theory. It was interesting but it could have been a Loy more interesting.
    • 4/5
      By walking with people (or dogs) with a different viewpoint or expertise, the author broadens her own sensitivity while walking through a city (NYC). By describing these walks and embellishing it with some science about our senses and our ability to attend, she also broadens the readers ability to see. It was easily read and enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      Fantastic! The author does a great job of sampling many different sciences to give the layman or -woman a new way of perceiving the ordinary environment. I turned down a lot of pages with new terms, funny moments, and interesting facts. For example: a thigmotaxic animal is one who likes keeping in contact with something as it travels, as mice like to travel along walls for orientation. I would never have consciously sought out information on mice traveling habits, but Horowitz is great at unraveling the things she discovers on her walks with subject experts as a detective novel might. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Alexandra Horowitz takes a walk around a block, mostly in her native New York City, with ten people (plus one dog), each of whom has some unusual perspective or pecific area of expertise, asking as she does so: what are they seeing that the rest of us would probably miss? A toddler finds his attention drawn to tiny details an adult would dismiss as uninteresting. A geologist points out fossils embedded in building stones. An expert in typography critiques the lettering on signs. A blind woman describes what it's like for her to navigate the street. An entomologist turns over rocks to reveal the bugs teeming underneath. And so on.One walk around the block with someone gives you fairly superficial access to their expertise, of course, and there were times when I found myself thinking that I would really have liked to get a little deeper into the science, or to have more of a first-hand account of her walking companions' perceptions, rather than focusing quite so much on Horowitz's own ruminations about trying to see more than she would have on her own. But that would have been a different sort of book, I suppose, and this one isn't bad. Every additional perspective is interesting, and there is definitely something to be said for encouraging oneself and others to take a second (and third, and eleventh) look at spaces that seem mundane and familiar.
    • 2/5
      This really is a book for dog-loving introverts. I guess they would really like it.Unfortunately, I'm more of an extrovert who has a thing for cats. So the book presented me with some nice tidbits (nicely written, too) on how we can learn to observe more in our daily surroundings, but the emotional mush surrounding the dog/dog owner relationship went over my head.
    • 2/5
      Disappointing. Great premise, but I found her writing style tiresome. Better as magazine articles and with more editing. The beginning of the book was especially painful and I hoped the experts would be more enlightening, but I found the walk itself was uninteresting.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Just managed to get through this.

      The subject matter was okay but the author is incredibly annoying.

      She goes out of her way to use unusual words to show how clever she is leading to interrupted reading while the dictionary is consulted.

      She also strains to make the most ordinary things seem amazing. Admittedly this is part of the aim of the book but some things ARE just ordinary.

      She also makes a series of statements of fact such as 4% of genes encode receptors for smell/sound without any references. This is overly simplifying things which is really misleading.

      She also claims to have these insightful thoughts in the middle of her walks. These are highly detailed and thoughtful but seemingly just spring into her mind for a split second. In reality it feels like these are the ideas she concocted when listening back to the interviews.

      The final chapter is painful where she says that she is magically changed and is a different person which comes across a little overexaggerated and to clean-cut an ending.

      Disappointing . . .

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The best chapters contain entertaining stories of the author's walks with various domain specialists - an entomologist, a sound engineer, etc. The chapters where Horowitz imposes an interpretation on someone else's experience, her young son, her dog, were less interesting to me because of their arbitrariness. The prose occasionally works too hard at being evocative. The asides on human perception and psychology were also quite interesting.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Not quite the sweet spot I was looking for-- simultaneously too much background info and too few insights. Also quite city (NYC) centric. But my walks are a bit different-- which is the point.
    • 4/5
      On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz is a delightful examination of our senses. The author takes walks with experts from different genera who provide varying perspectives on the urban environment that she walks every day. Ms. Horowitz begins by walking with her toddler and seeing what sees. She walks with a geologist, font designer, artist, insect expert, gait analyst, a blind person, a sound engineer, an urban biologist, and a dog. Every time I thought she had unveiled every possible dimension of the city, another layer was revealed. Ms. Horowitz provides background information on each subject area and how our senses operate, as well as portraying her own family life, personality, and that of her Manhattan neighborhood. Anyone with a lively curiosity will enjoy this book.
    • 4/5
      The premise is very intriguing and I did feel like I was getting to tag along with the various experts as they reviewed Manhattan and other cityscapes. Including the blind woman was a particularly interesting twist. I enjoyed the book quite a bit but, once I finished it, I realized I was still waiting for one more walk to give me a big "WOW" moment. Overall, it read a bit like a science teacher's outline for a field trip on how to improve her students' observation skills, but there weren't any big "WOW" moments in there. Definitely worth the read, but you can take your time walking to the bookstore to get a copy.
    • 3/5
      I like walking and I get a kick out of seeing new things so I hoped that this book which is about exactly that would be right up my alley. Although there was much to learn from the experts that Horowitz walked with I didn't feel that there was much that could be applicable to my walks. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to that is that I tend to walk where there is less concrete and more natural surroundings. For the most part Horowitz walked in Manhattan and never once went into Central Park. She asked various people to accompany her to point out things that she overlooked when she walked. It seemed to me that Horowitz must have been extremely unobservant before she went on these walks. One of the experts was a geologist and his job was to point out the different types of stone used in building or naturally occurring. It wasn't until finishing this book that Horowitz noticed that her own building used limestone that was replete with fossils of long dead sea creatures. Another expert was a wildlife biologist who specializes in urban animals such as racoons, rats, squirrels and so on. Again Horowitz apparently had never noticed a colony of birds building nests in a small gap between buildings in her neighbourhood until she had taken this walk. So, while Horowitz seemed to have widened her own horizons, I didn't find much that was applicable to my walking habits.
    • 4/5
      I read this as an audiobook while walking the dog every morning. It turned out to be the perfect dog-walking book. The author takes city walks with experts in various fields (including her dog) to discover the details each of them notice, that would be overlooked by most people. She also writes about the science and psychology of attention. So we get to learn about such disparate subjects as typefaces, insects, the senses, geology, and pedestrian traffic. My only complaint is that I would like her to have let the experts shine more, instead of breaking off for such large chunks to reflect on the nature of attention. This is one book that translates very well to the audio format, especially as the author does an excellent job narrating the edition I read.
    • 4/5
      A book for thinking about, for building synaptic connections. Not quite as long even as my usual reads, it took longer to finish because the end of each chapter seemed to require time for mulling over. There are as many worldviews as there are people on the planet and this book does a fine job of putting the reader into a dozen of them. Really, really good.
    • 5/5
      The in depth description of eleven walks in the same area of NYC with eleven different people with different ways of seeing, perceiving, and attentiveness makes for a fascinating book. Horowitz delves into the how and why we all 'see' the same thing in different ways making the ordinary become extraordinary. Worlds within worlds.
    • 4/5
      Page by page, Horowitz shows how much more there is to see—if only we would really look. On Looking is nutrition for the considered life, serving as a provocative response to our relentlessly virtual consciousness. 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.