A New Statesman Essential Non-Fiction Book of 2021 and Kirkus Best Book of 2021
'Delivers mind-expanding revelation and glorious originality and colour ... This is my book of the year' Patrick Barkham, author of The Butterfly Isles
What kind of creature is a human? If we don't know what we are, how can we know how to act? In Being a Human Charles Foster sets out to understand what a human is, inhabiting the sensory worlds of humans at three pivotal moments in our history.
Foster begins his quest in a wood in Derbyshire with his son, shivering, starving and hunting, trying to find a way of experiencing the world that recognises the deep expanse of time when we understood ourselves as hunter-gatherers, indivisible from the non-human world, and when modern consciousness was first ignited. From there he travels to the Neolithic, when we tamed animals, plants and ourselves, to a way of being defined by walls, fences, farms, sky gods and slaughterhouses, and finally to the rarefied world of the Enlightenment, when we decided that the universe was a machine and we were soulless cogs within it.
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Being a Human 9781788167178 Hardback
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- Authors:
- Foster, Charles
- Year Published:
- 2021
- Country of Publication:
- United Kingdom
- Format:
- Hardback
- ISBN:
- 9781788167178
- Number of Pages:
- 400
- Publication Date:
- 26/08/2021
- Publisher:
- Profile Books Ltd
- Place of Publication:
- London
- SKU:
- 9781788167178