Why We Sleep 
Being a Human
£16.99
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.
Out of stock
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.
| Weight | 0.506 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 21.8 × 14.2 × 4.2 cm |
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| Imprint | |
| Cover | Hardback |
| Pages | 320 |
| Language | English |
| Edition | |
| Dewey | 301 (edition:23) |
| Readership | General – Trade / Code: K |
