Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Being a Human: Adventures in 40000 years of consciousness
Author: FOSTER CHARLES
Format: HARDCOVER
Publication date: 02/11/2021
Imprint: PROFILE BOOKS (UK)
Price: $35.00
Publishing status: Active
A radical work of nature writing and philosophical enquiry, resituating us in our real human skins.
A New Statesman Essential Non-Fiction Book of 2021
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.
ISBN: 9781788167178
Dimension: 216mm X 135mm
Pages: 400