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Life Beyond Measure
  • Published: 29 April 2027
  • ISBN: 9781529990317
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $37.99
Categories:

Life Beyond Measure

Nature’s Hidden Wonders at Every Scale

Formats & editions
EBook
29 Apr 2027
Audiobook
29 Apr 2027
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In his prize-winning Sunday Times bestseller, An Immense World, Ed Yong invited us to perceive the world through other animals’ senses. Now he transforms our view of the world once again by revealing the hidden wonders of life at different scales.

All around us, just beyond our awareness, life proceeds in astonishing ways. The 100-ton blue whale easily crosses oceans, singing to fellow whales thousands of miles away. Alongside it a bacterium swims in a drop of seawater that is as vast for it as an ocean is to the whale. Hummingbirds move too quickly for us to follow, while plants move too languorously for us to perceive.

Every living thing operates at its own scale – the blend of size, range, pace, longevity, and influence that define the contours and rhythms of a life. We tend to think of the human scale as life’s default. But in Life Beyond Measure, Ed Yong coaxes us outside of our medium-sized, medium-lived, medium-paced, moderately mobile range and introduces us to entirely new worlds, some that could fit between two grains of sand. Fireflies assembling their luminous chorus; a bristlecone pine that's older than paper rounds the corner of its fifth millennium; shorebirds that fly across the world's biggest ocean without stopping; Pando, a forest that may be a single tree; and a host of other dazzling, disorienting entities expand our understanding of what life can be.

Mind-bending, exhilarating, and profound, Life Beyond Measure is a call to cast off our human perspective, to lose ourselves in the vastness and strangeness of nature, and by doing so, to discover how intimately connected to the rest of life we are.
  • Published: 29 April 2027
  • ISBN: 9781529990317
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $37.99
Categories:

About the author

Ed Yong

ED YONG is the author of two prize-winning New York Times bestsellers, An Immense World and I Contain Multitudes. He won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award in 2021 for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024. His work has appeared in many publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times, National Geographic, Wired, and The New Yorker; he was also featured in three editions of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, which he then guest-edited in 2021. He regularly does talks and interviews, and his TED talk on mind-controlling parasites has been watched by over 1.9 million people. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Liz Neeley, founder of Liminal Creations, and his corgi, Typo. He is almost certainly looking at birds right now.
portrait photo of Ed Yong

Also by Ed Yong

An Immense World (Young Readers Edition)
An Immense World
I Contain Multitudes
See all

Praise for Life Beyond Measure

Utterly extraordinary. Yong's spectacular new book is not just a mesmerizing examination of the wonders of life on Earth; it's no less than a biography of life itself

Emily St John Mandel, author of Exit Party

A tour de force. Life Beyond Measure is an invitation to transcend the limits of our bodies and enter a dazzling world of animals and plants that defies all expectation

Amy Tan, author of The Backyard Bird Chronicles

This book amazes like no other I’ve read. Yong is the perfect ambassador to the improbable wonderland of nature freed from the perceptual boxes we humans typically confine to it

Mary Roach, author of Stiff

I read Life Beyond Measure with reverence and an unmitigated sense of awe, feeling the world expanding around me with every page. With its unusual combination of erudition, heart and humour, Life Beyond Measure sets a new standard in nature writing

Hernan Diaz, author of Trust

Yong makes the invisible visible, and beautiful

Laura Spinney, author of Proto

Life Beyond Measure is a lyrical testament to the marvels of nature by one of the great masters of science writing. In clear, accessible prose that by turns delights, charms, and astonishes, Ed Yong conducts a fascinating tour of beings whose lives are utterly different from our own, and shows how, in myriad ways, they make our lives richer. This is a must-read for anyone who cares about Planet Earth

Olivia Judson, author of The Co-Creation

Page by compelling page, Life beyond Measure takes us deep into the curious patterns of the living world – it is a thrilling journey of discovery. From the profoundly weird to the awe inspiring, these vivid encounters with other species create wonder at life’s improbable proliferation. Dazzling, refreshing, brilliant

Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass