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

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog and The Year of the Puppy, this 'elegant and entertaining' (The Boston Globe) explanation of how humans perceive their environments '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). Alexandra Horowitz shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary--to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, 'the observation of trifles.' Structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, On Looking features experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. Horowitz also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it. What they see, how they see it, and why most of us do not see the same things reveal the startling power of human attention and the cognitive