Being a Human

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A radical work of nature writing and philosophical enquiry, resituating us in our real human skins.A New Statesman Essential Non-Fiction Book of 2021What kind of creature is a huma n? 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. Format: Hardcover Published: in UK in 2021 Publisher: Profile Books Pages: 379 Language: English ISBN 13: 9781788167178 ISBN 10: 1788167171 Show more