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

On Looking is a very intelligently written book. There is a saying that 'some people see more in a walk around the block then others see in a trip around the world'. This book reminds us that for the most part we see only what we expect to see. That is why it is so easy to hide something in plain view! It also reminds us that for the most part we sleep walk through our day - which isn't always a bad thing.
The author takes walks with experts in geology or sound production or insects and finds that these people are aware of things that she is not - not unless they point them out to her.
The world is full of sights, sounds, smells, textures, spaces, and invisible winds just to name a few. This books allows one to sample some of the unseen, unheard, un-felt magnificence the outside world has to offer most of all because it reminds us that MORE is OUT THERE!
This book is interesting and well written. The only dull walk the author takes us on is the first one where she does a solo trip around the block. After that the book is quite special! Enjoy!

A fabulous blogger whom I hold in great respect turned me on to this book. And who was I to resist eleven walks with expert eyes? If the whole point of life is to see a little better, then I'm all for a book that can expand my vision.

Here's some of what I really liked about the book:
-- The expert walk vignettes are very engaging, and Horowitz has a beautifully poetic writing style. The book is a joy to read. I finished it in two sittings, one of them late into the night. This is thriller-level readability, folks.
-- The experts really do have super x-ray vision in their domains. Their vision is so different, in fact, that when you enter their world, you feel as if you're moving around in a virtual reality overlay of a whole new dimension. Plants, animals, insects, rocks, letters, sounds you had never considered, all rise to attention's surface in 3-D relief.
-- The book is a bounty of fun esoteric facts: Raccoons can fit through a four-inch hole; squirrels, a quarter-size one; mice, dime-sized. The word "thigmotaxic" rocks. Instead of teeth, slugs have a "radula", a jagged tongue-like thing that leaves spiral marks on tree bark. Dogs first smell with the right nostril, then with the left once a scent becomes familiar.
-- The experts themselves are delightful characters. The mixture of their quirkiness and deep expertise makes you wish you could sit down for coffee with each and every one of them. Since that's probably not going to happen, we're lucky to have this book.

What I didn't like about the book:
-- It contains mistakes -- unpardonable mistakes of the kind that should get an editor fired. If you are keen-scented, you are macrosmatic, not macrosomatic (which means you have a bigger than normal body). You can have an obstructed bronchus, but not an obstructed bronchi. You don't have a mitrial valve, but you do have a mitral one. Concentric is a word; coencentric isn't. These would be minor lapses elsewhere, but in a book that is equal parts literature and science, they throw a faint light of doubt on everything else the author says. I picked up these mistakes because it's stuff I happened to study in school. Are there similar mistakes in the chapters on geology, zoology and acoustics that I would never catch? It makes the whole book feel slightly unreliable. I'm hoping they fixed these in the paperback edition.

-- The title promises "eleven walks with expert eyes." Two of the walks happen to be with the author's toddler son and her dog. While I will not challenge the kid and dog's expertise in the domains of kidhood and dogdom, I do doubt their ability to convey their perceptions to us accurately and fluently. In fact, I suspect the words come from the mom/owner. It's a fun conceit, and it almost works: the exercise of looking through the eyes of a kid and a dog are worthwhile. But I can do that myself any day: the words are not from the experts themselves. Either call the book "nine walks with expert eyes, with two bonus walks with my kid and dog thrown in for kicks", or give me two more real experts - a photographer, an historian, a physicist, an architect.

-- The promise of the book is to expand our vision: walks with expert eyes, sometimes "eyes" being a legitimate metaphor for non-visual perceptual domains like sound or smell. But above all, this is a book about the visual world. And Horowitz does a masterful job of describing the complexity her experts convey.

But where are the pictures?!? Yes, there are a few impressionistic doodles of a mouse, a turning head and a flock of birds, and there's a lovely print of Maira Kalman's blue couch painting (meaning that the publishers are fully capable of putting perfectly nice color photos in the book, and still didn't). But as I was reading, I was dying to see the pictures. No number of words can properly convey the difference between basalt, granite and schist in a way that would give me 0.1% of the expertise of the book's geologist, Sidney Horenstein. I want to actually SEE the bryozoans and the crinoids in the limestone so I can spot them when *I'm* walking around Manhattan. I want to see a Trendelenburg gait. Show me a darn picture of the typefaces, egg cases, exuviae, galls, mounds, nests you're describing so they come to life and I can recognize them, too. Isn't that the whole point of the book?

And where are the videos? If Proust had a video camera, he totally would have used it for his books. So in the year 2013, there's no reason for us to limit ourselves to mere words when you can stick a few 2-minute videos in an enhanced ebook (e.g. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which *is* a book for the ages, does this very effectively). Especially if a book is about walks: take me on a video walk! If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million. Even with her considerable verbal skill, Horowitz's words (or anyone's, for that matter) cannot ever succeed in describing human gait in a way that can compete with the instant, massive processing power of the human visual system. Here was an opportunity not only for effective pedagogy, but also for making this book a classic for the ages instead of just entertainment. Also, if you're listening, Mr Simon and Mr Schuster: books with pictures sell more because people like `em. More pictures next time, please.

In the end, the book is still delightful, and I can see myself picking it up and re-reading sections for years to come. At the same time, I can't help but feel that there was a missed opportunity for this book to be an even more epic adventure - one that not only entertains, but also truly broadens our vision and understanding as humans.
-- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., Happiness Engineer and author of "The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible", the highest-rated dating book on Amazon for 157 weeks

PS: I see that in the paperback edition they have changed the subtitle to "A Walker's Guide to the Art of Observation", which mitigates some of my objections. Hoping they made the corrections, too.

This is a field guide to getting the most out of walks in the city; though it’s presented through a series of essays. City-centeredness is the book’s niche. There are tons of books that teach one how to get more out of the subtle signs and signals seen in nature, but we tend to miss the nature (and a good deal of the culture) in our city walks because we view them in a utilitarian fashion and because there is so much shouting for our attention that it’s easy to miss nature’s subtle cues.

The book consists of 12 chapters—each of which is organized around a city walk. Eleven of these walks are with experts who offer the author (and her readers) greater insight into some dimension of the city walk experience that is often lost to the limits of our attention. When I use the word “expert,” I use it broadly. The reader may find some of these individuals more worthy of the title “expert” than others—e.g. two among them are the author’s 19 month old son and her dog—but they all offer a unique insight. [You may recognize the author’s name from a popular book she wrote on dog behavior, and that’s a particular area of interest for her.] Others are the kind of experts that might testify in court or be asked to give a consultation at a corporation. Along the way, Horowitz inserts more general information on the psychology and science of human attention--and its limits—as is relevant to the larger discussion.

The twelve chapters are organized into three parts. The first part deals with the inanimate dimension of the city. Its four chapters deal with the things that children notice owing to either their height or their unjadedness, the natural materials of the city (rocks and biomass), fonts and signage, and the underappreciated ordinary.

The second part explores the animate part of the city, including insects, animals, and humans. The reader will learn that--despite the fact that they may only see the occasional bird or squirrel—the city is teeming with non-human fauna. The two chapters that deal with humans take quite different perspectives. One is with the Director of the Project on Public Spaces, an expert on how cities are organized (by planning, organically, and by default) and the effect that this has on people and their movement through cities. The last chapter in this part is by a doctor whose expertise is making diagnoses in the style of Sherlock Holmes by means of close observation of the minutiae of a person’s appearance and posture.

The final part is about the sensory experience of a city walk. The first chapter in this section details a walk with a blind woman who is attuned to moving about the city using her other senses. There’s a chapter with an expert on sound, and the walk she takes with her dog—whose experience is largely informed by its olfactory sense. The last chapter is a short summation of what the author has learned and begun to apply in her own solo walks.

The book has few graphics, e.g. depictions of relevant art. There are source citations arranged by chapter in end-note form.

I found this book to be intriguing and beneficial. I think we could all benefit from city walkers who were more tuned in to what was going on around them. (Sadly, the trend seems to be going the other way.) I’d recommend this book for anyone who likes to take a walk, and nature lovers may find it unexpectedly fascinating.