Ed Yong Audiobooks

An Immense World: the Pulitzer winner who lets you borrow another animal's senses

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.7/5 average

5 listener ratings

Who is Ed Yong?

Trained as a zoologist and now among the most decorated science journalists writing in English, Ed Yong was born in 1981 and educated in Britain before moving to the United States, where he joined The Atlantic. In 2021 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series on the COVID-19 pandemic that a great many readers treated as a lifeline rather than as news.

His subject, across his books and hundreds of articles, is the enormous amount of biology happening just outside human attention. I Contain Multitudes made the case for the microbes that constitute most of us. An Immense World travelled further out, into the sensory lives of other animals.

What distinguishes him is restraint. Yong resists the easy anthropomorphism that plagues nature writing, holds his metaphors to account, and still leaves you slightly dizzy at the strangeness of perfectly ordinary creatures. He is also, unusually for a science writer, a dependable reporter of institutional failure: the pandemic work was as much about the machinery of public health as it was about a virus.

Ed Yong in audiobooks

We hold An Immense World, the 2022 book that took the German word Umwelt, the sensory bubble each creature lives inside, and built fourteen hours of reporting around it. Electric fields read by fish, magnetic north seen by robins, an entire treehopper conversation conducted through plant stems: Yong goes to the researchers, watches the experiments, and comes back with the wonder intact.

He narrates it himself, which suits the material exactly. The delivery is level and companionable, and when a fact deserves a pause he gives it one instead of reaching for awe.

It rewards unhurried listening, ideally a chapter at a time on a walk where you can look properly at a bird afterwards. See what we have below.