Search results for ""author caspar henderson""

A compendium of sounds from this world and beyond, from the author of A New Map of Wonders and The Book of Barely Imagined Beings.

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We live in a world that is known, every corner thoroughly explored. But has this knowledge cost us the ability to wonder? Wonder, Caspar Henderson argues, is at its most supremely valuable in just such a world because it reaffirms our humanity and gives us hope for the future. That's the power of wonder, and that's what we should aim to cultivate in our lives. But what are the wonders of the modern world?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.

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From Axolotl to Zebrafish, discover a host of barely imagined beings: real creatures that are often more astonishing than anything dreamt in the pages of a medieval bestiary. Ranging from the depths of the ocean to the most arid corners of the earth, Caspar Henderson captures the beauty and bizarreness of the many living forms we thought we knew and some we could never have contemplated, inviting us to better imagine the precarious world we inhabit. A witty, vivid blend of pioneering natural history and spiritual primer, infectiously celebratory about life's sheer ingenuity and variety, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a mind-expanding, wonder-inducing read.

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A compendium of sounds from this world and beyond, from the author of A New Map of Wonders and The Book of Barely Imagined Beings Sound shapes our world in invisible but profound ways, and here Caspar Henderson brings his characteristic curiosity, knowledge and sense of wonder to the subject to take us on an exhilarating journey through the heard universe. A Book of Noises gathers together sounds from the cosmos, the natural world, the human world, and the invented world, and contains quiet pockets of silence. From the vast sound of sand in the desert to the tuneful warble of a songbird, to the meditative resonance of a temple bell and the improvisational melodies of jazz, this is a celebration of all things auricular.

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