I’m really grateful to several esteemed friends and colleagues whose blurbs so closely match what I hoped the text would accomplish. 8/

(Also, as with the rest of my life, I created this book without any use of generative AI, whatsoever). 7/

Like I CONTAIN MULTITUDES and AN IMMENSE WORLD, this 3rd book is about parts of nature hidden from our perception. It defamiliarizes us what we thought we understood, and makes us reconsider familiar concepts like individuality, age, migration, movement. I filled every page with awe & wonder. 6/

This is the first book I’ve written that encompasses the entirety of the living world. It features animals, yes, including fireflies, bar-tailed godwits, ocean skaters, and hagfish. But its protagonists also include plants, fungi, protists, bacteria, and more. It's all here. 5/

It’s also about the layered nature of life: how organisms fashion amazing materials from simple building blocks, how they gain new powers by swarming together, & how groups can evolve into new kinds of individuals. And it’s about scales of influence & how organisms big and small remake our world. 4/

LIFE BEYOND MEASURE is about life at every scale. It’s about what it’s like to be as large as a whale or as small as a bacterium, to travel worldwide like a migrating bird or to be rooted in place like a tree, to live for months like some reef fish or for millennia like a bristlecone pine. 3/

LIFE BEYOND MEASURE is the culmination of so much for me. The interests, values, and skills I’ve cultivated across 2 decades of science-writing: I poured them all into this book. At a time of crisis, I wanted to make my biggest, boldest attempt at showing why the living world—all of it—matters. 2/