Being a Human - Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness

A radical work of nature writing and philosophical enquiry, resituating us in our real human skins.

Summary

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.

Product details

• Authors: Charles Foster
• Publisher: Profile Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 26.08.2021
• EAN: 9781788167178
• ISBN: 978-1-78816-717-8
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 142 mm x 218 mm x 42 mm
• Subjects: Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Miscellaneous; prehistory, Anthropology, Self-help & personal development, Self-help, personal development and practical advice