Books by Caspar Henderson
Caspar Henderson is a writer, journalist and editor. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, Nature, New Scientist, the New York Review of Books and openDemocracy. He is a past recipient of an IUCN-Reuters award for best environmental reporting in Western Europe. His debut book, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, won the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors and the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Prize. A New Map of Wonders followed in 2017. The Book of Noises is out now, published by Granta in the UK and the University of Chicago Press in the US.
A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous
by Caspar Henderson
“I’m not a physicist or an acoustician, but a rough layman’s definition could start with this: sound is a vibration through matter. It’s a wave passing through molecules and jiggling them as it goes. But that’s not all. Sound is also the perception of those waves by a living being with a sensory apparatus that can detect them. The sensory apparatus may be a pair of ears, but it can also be something else!
When I was a small child we used to visit my grandparents in a small village in Hampshire on weekends. On Sunday mornings the peels of church bells would echo off the steep hillsides surrounding the village and you would be surrounded by this extraordinary sound. That may be where it started for me. I’ve also had an intense—perhaps excessively intense—love of various forms of music since my teens. A few years ago while I was working on a book about the sense of wonder, I was entranced by the sound of thousands of birds flying overhead, and I realised that for all my love of sound and music there was a lot I did not actually know. A Book of Noises arose from that realisation. It’s a brief tour through the nature of sound and music, and a visit to the sound worlds of space, the non-living Earth, non-human life, and humanity.”
Interviews with Caspar Henderson
-
1
The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places
by Bernie Krause -
2
Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World
by Nina Kraus -
3
The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth
by Michael Spitzer -
4
Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend
by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods -
5
The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants
by Karen Bakker
The best books on Sound, recommended by Caspar Henderson
The best books on Sound, recommended by Caspar Henderson
Sound encodes incredible amounts of information—not only words, music, and other audible forms of communication, but complex spatial data too. Caspar Henderson, author of the ‘auraculous’ new essay collection The Book of Noises, selects five of the best books on sound, from the buzzing of bees to the ghostly whisper of the aurora.
The best books on Science and Wonder, recommended by Caspar Henderson
When we see a rainbow or another beautiful spectacle in nature, what is that sense of wonder we are filled with? How can we nurture it? Caspar Henderson, author of A New Map of Wonders (and Five Books science and environment editor) recommends the best books to help us develop our sense of wonder.
The Best Books for Growing up in the Anthropocene, recommended by Caspar Henderson
Welcome to life in the Anthropocene, a new epoch in the history of life where the impact of humanity on the Earth system is so great, we need a new term for it. Author and journalist Caspar Henderson offers a rich reading list to help ourselves and our children grow up in the Anthropocene.
Interviews where books by Caspar Henderson were recommended
-
1
Pax: War and Peace in Rome's Golden Age
by Tom Holland -
2
Vergil: The Poet's Life
by Sarah Ruden -
3
Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
by Nicholas Shakespeare -
4
The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Global History of Mathematics & its Unsung Trailblazers
by Kate Kitagawa & Timothy Revell -
5
The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism
by Sebastian Edwards
Notable Nonfiction of Fall 2023, recommended by Sophie Roell
Notable Nonfiction of Fall 2023, recommended by Sophie Roell
As summer collapses into fall across the northern hemisphere, Five Books editor Sophie Roell takes a look at the nonfiction books that have been published over the last three months. Reading serious nonfiction books remains the easiest way to get up to speed on not only things you’re already interested in, but lots of things you didn’t know you didn’t know.
