Life Beyond Measure

Just as he did in his New York Times bestseller, An Immense World, Ed Yong expands our perception of nature, this time by revealing the astonishing ways living things operate at different scales.

“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

All around us, just beyond our awareness, life proceeds in astounding ways. A 100-ton blue whale swims easily across fathomless oceans, singing to fellow whales thousands of miles away. Alongside it a bacterium swims in a drop of seawater that is as vast to it as an ocean is to the whale. Hummingbirds are too speedy 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 defines 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 from 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 assemble their luminous chorus; a bristlecone pine rounds the corner of its fifth millennium; shorebirds fly without stopping across the world’s largest ocean; a pink, rubbery salamander the size of a forearm rarely moves at all; an ant colony develops a personality, and a host of other dazzling, disorienting entities expand our understanding of what life can be.

Mind-bending, exhilarating, funny, and profound, Life Beyond Measure is a call to cast off our human perspective, lose ourselves in the vastness and strangeness of nature, and, by doing so, discover how intimately connected to the rest of life we are.