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pietrzak's review
4.0
Very interesting, learned an awful lot, and written in a popular science format where the chapters are broken up into nice, consumable chunks. Some of the concepts got a little vague as the book went on. These books walk a line between indigenous knowledge and the scientific method and I find that can get too blurry for me as a ready. I was really impressed by many things I learned though about communication in various species of large creatures as well as smaller ones, plants, etc. interspaces communication and the future taking advantage of computing is really fascinating stuff.
seclement's review
4.0
A book in a similar vein to The Hidden Life of Trees and the Inner Life of Animals, this is a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion of acoustic ecology, animal and plant communication, and many other elements relating to the sounds of nature. There will certainly be many ecologists, linguists, biologists, and others who will take issue with this book and accuse Bakker of anthropomorphising animals and plants. Or perhaps for overstretching what we know, based on the studies she covers. And whilst that may be true at points, I think Bakker does an excellent job overall in explaining where our knowledge is tentative, impartial, and speculative, versus where we have quite a lot of evidence. As for anthropomorphising, she confronts this head on at several points, and also makes fair points about the flip side of this, anthropocentrism, which dominates many scientific fields and tends to assert that humans provide the standard against which all things relating to communication, intelligence, and consciousness should be measured. A lot of the research in here is at the edge of our current knowledge, so I have no doubt there will be a lot more work to emerge in years to come, some of which might shed new light on what she shares here. I found it a worthwhile and engaging read, and would recommend it for plant, animal, nature and music lovers alike. It's the most comprehensive book I have read on the topic to date.
personarobot's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Each generation has its silences, at which later generations can only wonder.
An interesting read/listen. I alternated between reading my digital copy and listening to my audiobook. The parts about conservation using bioacoustics are incredibly interesting, and there were other sections that absolutely lost me (and so I sped through it via audiobook).
waxponds's review against another edition
4.0
really interesting but did i fully understand it? not really. all i know is that nature is so cool
hillsax's review
Really fascinating content but my non-science brain couldn’t keep up past the first few chapters.
lelila's review
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
3.75
Ein schönes Buch um einen Überblick über nicht menschliche Kommunikation zu erhalten. Und auch einen Ausblick in die Zukunft erhalten wie kann die Forschung helfen die Massen aussterben gemindert werden wenn das was wir neu lernen anwenden.