An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
Science journalist Ed Yong surveys how other animals perceive the world, building the book around the German concept of Umwelt — the sliver of reality any given creature can actually sense. Thirteen chapters work through smell and taste, light, color, pain, heat, contact, surface vibrations, sound, echoes, electric fields and magnetic fields, closing on how human light and noise pollution wreck those sensory worlds.
Somewhere in the middle chapters the shape gives out: another animal, another lab visit, nothing accumulating. "I feel like Yong just gathered so much material that he had trouble organizing it in a way that would go beyond a simple collection of facts," one reader writes, and with no argument holding the parts together the organizing word ends up doing the work alone. Over fourteen hours of audio the references to a creature's umwelt "become repetitive and I wished the author had used an alternate phrase from time to time." Meanwhile "there was too much focus on telling stories about the people researching the animals rather than just letting the animals themselves shine." Push into human society and "a few of his connections were a bit tenuous."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
