Title | : | A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Modern Marvels |
Author | : | |
Rating | : | |
ISBN | : | 022629191X |
ISBN-10 | : | 9780226291918 |
Format Type | : | Hardcover |
Number of Pages | : | 368 |
Publication | : | First published October 26, 2017 |
Henderson’s brilliant exploration borrows from the form of one of the oldest and most widely known sources of wonder: maps. Large, detailed mappae mundi invited people in medieval Europe to vividly imagine places and possibilities they had never seen before: manticores with the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the stinging tail of a scorpion; tribes of one-eyed men who fought griffins for diamonds; and fearsome Scythian warriors who drank the blood of their enemies from their skulls. As outlandish as these maps and the stories that went with them sound to us today, Henderson argues that our views of the world today are sometimes no less incomplete or misleading. Scientists are only beginning to map the human brain, for example, revealing it as vastly more complex than any computer we can conceive. Our current understanding of physical reality is woefully incomplete. A New Map of Wonders explores these and other realms of the wonderful, in different times and cultures and in the present day, taking readers from Aboriginal Australian landscapes to sacred sites in Great Britain, all the while keeping sight questions such as the cognitive basis of wonder and the relationship between wonder and science.
Beautifully illustrated and written with wit and moral complexity, this sequel to The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a fascinating account of the power of wonder and an unforgettable meditation on its importance to our future.
A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Modern Marvels Reviews
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There was a time, when many of the upper and upper middle class homes had a room called a "Cabinet of Curiousities", "Wunderkammer", or something similar. It held fossils, taxidermy, oddly shaped antlers or coral or other animal parts, paintings, small sculptures, crystals or other geological oddities, and basically anything else that would be suitable for impressing your guests. It was sort of like a substitute for TV, except way cooler.
This book, is an attempt to create a 21st century Chamber of Wonders, in book form. There are plenty of visuals, which is nice, but the emphasis is on the text, which is really in many ways an attempt to get you, the reader, to realize just how amazing the universe is. In truth, then, it is generally an attempt to get you to realize how amazing it is that we, the human species, have figured out so many things about the universe.
We begin with light, because the event that gave the author the idea for this book was an incident in his kitchen one morning. There was a series of reflections outside his window that eventually ended up in the mysterious patch of light on the ceiling of his kitchen. After a few minutes, he had realized where it was coming from, and laughed out loud, causing his very young daughter to laugh as well, and he had the idea to try to make a book of these kind of moments; the wonder and joy that comes from learning about a thing in the world that you didn't know before (or didn't understand).
Some people, of course, don't like it when things are explained, and think that a "wonder" should be a mystery, unexplained or better yet unexplainable. This book takes the opposite take, and tells us about a whole "Wunderkammer" of phenomena, from light to heart to brain and beyond, that are explained (at least in part), and still wondrous. There is no Big Idea here, no unifying theme, except this, and it is enough!
This is a book ideally suited for reading in small doses. I read it over breakfast, a few pages at a time. Wonder for breakfast. It was a good way to put any of the disappointments of the day before behind me, and a great way to start each day with open eyes and an openness to wonder. I was sorry to see it end, and look forward to the author's next book. -
2 Stars - Just okay
I was wholly underwhelmed with this book. It had such great potential, but fell flat because of the author’s lack of focus and depth.
Henderson attempts to explore the concept of wonder in the context of science, sweeping across regions of the world and eras. It’s an ambitious task. He organized the book into 7 major sections: light, life, heart, brain, self, world, and perhapsatron. Interesting, but ultimately they all read as meh.
I appreciate that the author acknowledges right away that he’s not an expert in any of the areas he explores. Initially, I didn’t think his non-expertise would be an issue but it was, but not in the obvious way. He attempted to do too much and each section jumps around too much. I didn’t connect with it.
Another issue I take with the book, and this is me really nit-picking, is the way it starts. Henderson starts by describing a moment of inspiration — light dancing on his kitchen walls. I found it cliche and uninspiring.
This book could have been great if he had focused in on one of his wonder objects/concepts and dedicated the whole book to those. That way he could have worked out all of the kinks and really came up with a way to write that was engaging. Hey, he could’ve even done a series to include all 7 if he really wanted to.
The book contains marginalia (mostly quotes that don’t add anything to the text), photos, charts, and graphs — all nice stuff. There’s also a bibliography at the end, which is always a good thing. The book seems well researched at the very least.
Do I recommend? Eh, probably not. The writing is fine, but it wasn’t for me and I couldn’t imagine finding a time/circumstance to recommend this one. -
There was a time when humans had a natural curiosity and wonder for the world around themselves. Before Google, to find things out you actually had to go and learn them, experience them or find and read the book about it. Nowadays anyone with an interweb connection can quickly read up about anything about any subject. By having everything available at our fingertips has meant that information is transitory, read but never absorbed and more importantly as Henderson argues in this book, we have almost lost the ability to wonder.
People have wondered what is over that far hill and what lies just beyond the horizon for millennia now and the oldest form of this speculation was the map. These mappae mundi were the places where people's imaginations could run riot, full of strange and magical creatures and of unknown lands, these were the internet of the day.
Should we want to look up from the blue LED glare of our screens though there is still a universe of wonder out there? Henderson takes us on a journey through what he considers to be some of the wonders still left in the world. Beginning with light where he explores from the photon to the black hole passing under the rainbow. He then moves within our body to discover more about the workings of the heart and brain. The chapter on the physical brain leads on to the concept of self as we currently understand it.
The final two chapters and my favourites were on how we see the world then and now and the wonderfully titled Adventures with Perhapsatron. Throughout the book, there are diagrams and illustrations to complement the text and I particularly liked the use of side notes to add a little extra depth, though the grey font wasn't the easiest to read. Overall an enjoyable book. -
Absolutnie fascynująca, stymulująca i inspirująca! Cieszę się, że przeczytałem ją w tym szczególnym czasie, bo pomaga skierować myśli w stronę rzeczy, zjawisk zadziwiających i pięknych.
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Science, history, philosophy, literature, poetry, art all kind of mooshed together in s book about wonder and wonderful things and ideas. As usual, I didn’t like the last couple chapters as much as the rest of it, but I’ve said that in so many of my reviews that I know it must be something about me, not the books. I guess authors sometimes save certain bits for last, and somehow those aren’t the bits I like. But I DID like the book overall.
Had weird formatting for the footnotes, they were in the margins instead of the bottom of the page. Kinda fun, kinda strange. -
2.5* - Solidly middle of the road.
I'll be honest, I skimmed to the end of this one. If you come in with no prior knowledge of the subjects Henderson writes about, you'll probably love this. The Heart and Brain chapters, I really enjoyed as I don't know a lot about those subjects. It's pretty surface level, so a good introduction but not for people who want to go deeper. Unfortunately, the known outweighed the wonderful for me. -
A veces la ciencia y sus descubrimientos le restan lirismo y belleza a la explicación de algunos fenómenos naturales. Para los griegos y los romanos el arco iris era un camino que había creado Iris, mensajera entre el cielo y la tierra. Para los pueblos germánicos era el cuenco donde se guardó la pintura utilizada en la creación para teñir a los pájaros. Para los finlandeses y los lapones era el arco del dios del trueno, que usaba relámpagos como flechas. Cualquiera de estas explicaciones pueden sonar mejor que describirlo como la descomposición de la luz solar en el espectro visible por la refracción de los rayos del sol cuando atraviesan pequeñas gotas de agua contenidas en la atmósfera terrestre.
Este libro pretende subrayar las maravillas que hay a nuestro alrededor y de las que no somos plenamente conscientes en nuestra vida cotidiana: desde el latir firme y regular de nuestro corazón o la complejidad de nuestro cerebro, hasta las distancias siderales entre galaxias o los procesos de fusión nuclear que se producen en el sol a los que debemos la vida tal y como la conocemos. Un estupendo paseo que nos recuerda lo complicado que es haber llegado a este punto en el que yo estoy escribiendo una reseña de un libro que igual alguien se para a leer: cuántos átomos tuvieron que unirse para crear las moléculas convenientes, cuanta materia estelar tuvo que viajar por el espacio en el momento preciso para formar la tierra o cuantos seres unicelulares tuvieron que reproducirse hasta llegar a nuestro hommo sapiens, capaz de dominar el planeta y crear las más maravillosas y delicadas obras artísticas o los mayores avances científicos, pero con la capacidad destructora de seguir provocando guerras o alterar los equilibrios del ecosistema en el que vive.
A eso nos invita este libro, a pararnos y mantener siempre alerta nuestra capacidad de asombro, porque "la maravilla está aquí, no allí. Ahora, no por llegar, ahora siempre". -
More of a surface-level catalogue of the books the author has read and things he’s seen online, with mildly related anecdotes and poetry sprinkled into the margins along the way. It’s a sum exactly as great as its parts, but not greater. And if you're the kind of person who's curious about this kind of book in the first place, then there's a good chance you're already familiar with much of what he covers anyway.
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This book was all over the place. Some good passages but it seemed to be a bit of a random walk. Found myself scrolling through some parts quickly.
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"… among the most important challenges facing you and me, surely, is the need to develop awareness worthy of the complexity and beauty of creation." (pg. 190)
A fascinating science book slightly diminished by some eccentricities and an occasional lack of focus. Caspar Henderson's book A New Map of Wonders begins by bursting forth like a horn of plenty, and I thought I had found a new favourite for my shelf. Henderson uses an anecdote of seeing his young daughter experience a gentle pool of sunlight in their house ("created by trillions of photons… flowing from a stupendous thermonuclear explosion tens of millions of miles away" (pg. 3)) to kick off "a journey in search of modern marvels", as the book's subtitle puts it.
This, as I said, is a horn of plenty; each page of the book, from beginning to end, contains a wealth of scientific and humanistic anecdotes that (I hope) I will remember and be thinking about for a long time. From the chimpanzees in Tanzania who were observed to routinely climb to the top of a ridge to watch the sunset, while holding hands (pg. 5), to the 2016 discovery that "plants may 'see' underground by channelling light from the surface all the way to the tips of their roots" (pg. 164), Henderson offers up an almost breathless array of awe-inspiring provocations to wonder.
It does, at times, become a bit too filling. The book can be slow-going, just because there is so much to unpick (that's an observation rather than a complaint), and there are so many interesting tangents that the broad chapter parameters – on 'light', 'life', 'the heart', 'the brain', and so on – often lack a polemical or journalistic force that they might have benefited from. Henderson's purpose for the book – "a better appreciation of both the things we wonder at and the nature of wonder itself" (pg. 3) – can often become lost to the reader, and the name-checking of 'wonder' after each long and intense ramble through the myriad discoveries of science often seem like attempts to wrestle back control of an expanding project. As a reading experience, the book is longer than its page count suggests.
This occasional lack of focus, and the sense that the book was bursting at its seams, prevented A New Map of Wonders from becoming a true favourite of mine, but in truth its genuine drawbacks are few. The environmental discussion towards the end, though worthy, was essentially a regurgitation of the new orthodoxy, at odds with the author's vivacity and originality elsewhere. Similarly, the bleak picture of the future painted in the final chapter – income inequality, climate change, automation, etc. – left me rather tired and depressed; an odd note on which to end a book about the wonders of life. Henderson also shows his political cards in this final chapter, trying to nudge the reader towards Islington-set luxury communism and denouncing Trump with the words of that well-known authority on politics, Zadie Smith (pp312-3). These objections are relative to personal taste, of course, but I for one don't like being nudged into political discussion in a science book, particularly when the author's casual dinner-party biases remain unexamined. I don't resent it, and sometimes I agree with it, but I'm just weary of every damn thing nowadays putting its two political cents into everything.
As for more objective flaws, Henderson occasionally delivers some eccentric word choices – 'kludge' and 'staggeringlier', for example. Apropos of nothing, we get the line "I reflect on a political and economic system that squcks our thrugs till all we can whupple is geep" (pg. 14), which I can only assume was included in order to win a bet. The plethora of quotations in the margins of the book derail as often as they illuminate, and have the further effect of shrinking the area for the main text. Between the small size and the frequently grey font, the book is – physically, for the eyes – taxing to read.
For the other flaws I mentioned above, such as the tangents and the rambles, the slow pace and density of the book, they are ones the reader comes to enjoy, such is the cornucopic charm of the book. Henderson's New Map might not be very useful for orienting yourself or for getting clear and accurate directions, but there is a joy in being lost, in finding new things by happenstance, new connections that you didn't expect, and this the book provides.
"… there is another dimension to what I would like to see as 'true' wonder, and that is strong cognitive engagement – an intensity of thought as well as feeling…" (pg. 216) -
Książka jest pięknie wydana, jest bardzo czytelna i sposób tworzenia przypisów jest moim ulubionym. Niestety sposób pisania autora do przypada mi do gustu. Tak jak w jego poprzedniej książce, tak i w tej oprócz rzeczy interesujących dokłada swoją filozofię. Rozumiem to , bo każdy autor w swoich dziełach zawiera swoje myślenie, poglądy, siebie. Niestety Henderson należy do tych, którzy pozostawiają duży ślad siebie. Sprawia to, że książka jest dużo obszerniejsza w treści, ale pozostawia ogromny niedosyt informacji.
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A compendium of staggering things. Caspar is the king of segue – he sails through a million topics while quoting a crazy number of references (including a great selection of poetry), somehow without frying his brain. I used a very snazzy German magnifying glass to read the tiny grey side notes (which made it all the more exciting to read).
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Loved this book. I've always been a curious person and always randomly reading things anyways, but Henderson's book just turbo-charged my curiosity. I've pretty much dog-eared the whole book because I wanted to go google things afterwards. And this is the magic of Henderson's book. He makes you go wow that's amazing and want to learn more about it :)
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I liked this book. It was a bit dense at first, but eventually it mellowed out and was quite enjoyable. Gave me a good number of things I want to research more. Perhaps a bit New Agey for my tastes, although I got the impression the author wasn't a natural optimist.
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An awe-inspiring if brain-muddling exploration of the wondrous things around us and comprising us.
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Aun aprendo. And with that in mind, this is a great book to start.
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Henderson writes well and offers some remarkable stories and winsome reflections on a variety of today’s “wonders.” I likely will pick up this book again in the future.
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Can Caspar Henderson become my uncle or something? I would talk with him every evening, for hoours.
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The Language or the way in which the author describes the miracles may seem tough for some. Still, you can feel his passion with which he writes theougjout the text and it is contagious.
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Wydaje się być napisana trochę chaotycznie i wiele rzeczy jest bez związku ze sobą, ale poza tym bardzo ciekawa i pouczająca.
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Available at Carlos Museum Bookshop ~
http://carlos.emory.edu -
i really really think this will be super fascinating and the book itself is gorgeous and I really want to read it and learn about science
but I've been "reading" this for two weeks and all I've read is the first 5 pages of the introduction and I just have to accept that its not going to happen right now. and then maybe I can move onto actually reading a book wow imagine that