Publishers Weekly
★ 08/09/2021
Barrister and philosopher Foster (Being a Beast) travels back in time, over hills, and inside sea caves for this wondrous and moving examination of “what the self is.” On “a desperate search to know what I am, how I should live and what shape consciousness adopts when it is folded into a human body,” Foster traces three phases of evolution. He begins 40,000 years ago, when upper-Paleolithic hunter-gatherers became “behaviorally modern.” Next, he describes Neolithic settlements around 12,000 years ago, when humans domesticated crops and animals and “we started to get boring and miserable.” Then comes an examination of the Enlightenment—which he argues continues to this day. Despite so much knowledge and advancement, he writes, people are “ontologically queasy” and “laughably maladapted to our current lives,” which has led to widespread alienation, insomnia, and depression. To get back in touch with the “constant ecstatic contact with earth, heaven, trees and gods” he argues humans need, Foster witnesses shimmering visions, eats roadkill, contemplates birdsong and language, and hypothesizes that consciousness exists beyond humans, who for a while contain it. Foster is a wonderful prose stylist, and knows how to build a case and support it with plentiful detail. This powerful account is a remarkable achievement. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
"Dazzling and eccentric . . . Foster is a beautiful writer and an engaging companion throughout this strange, occasionally maddening book. The argument—that we as a species have lost something in our move from wandering animism to settled civilisation—is a powerful one, amply supported by learned quotations and dense footnotes . . . A wonderfully fun if entirely bonkers read."
—The Guardian
"Being a Human, like Being a Beast, the (also extraordinary) book that preceded it, is both a learned treatise and a kind of visionary journalism; it reports back from the edges of our cramped consciousness . . . In search of who we are, pursuing his own brand of gonzo neurobiology, Foster flings himself physically into various inhospitable corners of the English countryside, depriving himself of everyday comforts that his perceptions may be cleansed. And so they are."
—The Atlantic
"Foster is a writer of extraordinary ability. His descriptions of nature dazzle . . . Being a Human [is] a lesson in what to watch for in nature. It’s a discourse on the sentience we may have had as early humans and that, over millennia, we’ve somehow roasted into a crisp. It’s funny. It’s moving. It’s mind-expanding. It’s a collection of thoughts to read again and again."
—Forbes
"A truly wonderful book . . . in the literal sense of the phrase. A book of wonders, so many of them to be seen living simultaneously in the present and the past, that you constantly find the now in the then and the then in the now."
—Lewis H. Lapham, The World in Time podcast (Lapham's Quarterly)
"A magpie book full of intriguing anthropological sketches . . . that fits neatly into the growing library of modern British natural history writing, alongside the best of Nan Shepherd, Robert Macfarlane, and Roger Deakin. A splendid assessment of the many ways there are to be a person, for good and ill."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"A wondrous and moving examination . . . To get back in touch with the 'constant ecstatic contact' [with nature] he argues humans need, Charles Foster witnesses shimmering visions, eats roadkill, contemplates birdsong and language, and hypothesizes that consciousness exists beyond humans. Foster is a wonderful prose stylist, and knows how to build a case and support it with plentiful detail. This powerful account is a remarkable achievement."
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
"Being Human is a startling reset on our understanding of the journey of human thought. Approaching the question from a totally new perspective of lived experience, Charles Foster shows us how we came to be the people we are, with the values we exert in the world. Not only are the revelations startling, but the metaphoric power of Foster’s language is frequently astonishing. I wish I’d written this book."
—Carl Safina, author of Becoming Wild
"What a mad, brilliant, mind-expanding book. Being a Human offers a thrilling deep dive through our evolutionary past, and a witty and learned commentary on why we are the way we are—and what wisdom we've lost along the way. Foster is a true modern polymath who writes with wit, humor and heart."
—Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment
"Hugely moving, filled with intelligence, Being a Human scurries between centuries with us between its teeth. Charles Foster has invoked a living presence in these pages, a contract with the uncanny. To know a thing about the future we need to retrace our steps into our old mind. We could start here."
—Martin Shaw, author of Smoke Hole
"Charles Foster's writing is matchless. No one else could tackle the whole of human evolution, the history and implications of our 'inadequate mutations,' with such wit and elegance. Brace yourselves for a thrilling encounter with the other, with the marvelous, terrifying spectacle of the self."
—Helen Mort, author of Never Leave the Dog Behind
"Being a Human is a work of shaggy genius. Its subject is gargantuan in scale; its humor has a reckless panache; its argument is brilliantly original; and above all it is written with a matchless audacity of soul. It is one of the most important books I have ever read."
—Jay Griffiths, author of Why Rebel?
"A daredevil read. Once again, Charles Foster has journeyed to places most of us wouldn't dare and emerged with a book that is passionate and kind, deeply intelligent and uproariously funny."
—Helen Jukes, author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings
"A brilliant, inventive, and unsettling exploration of our glorious and broken nature, Foster's work shakes us out of dozy estrangement from our own humanity and welcomes us into the mysteries of belonging. Its richness demands careful reading."
—David George Haskell, author of The Forest Unseen
"This is the most wonderful book—deftly written, highly imaginative, and a delight to read—and its message is such that its importance simply cannot be overstated. It gives a devastatingly clear portrait of humanity as we have become, and of what we once had—and still could have—but instead are in the process of throwing away, perhaps forever."
—Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary
"Being a Human is one of the most original inquiries into the who, what, and why or human existence to appear in recent years. Charles Foster writes with inspiring brilliance, originality, and simplicity. I love this book. It should be widely read, for the benefit of all us humans."
—Larry Dossey, author of One Mind
"Fascinating . . . When you read the book, it'll make you think."
—The Circle of Insight podcast
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-06-21
British scholar and writer Foster delivers a spirited romp through human history and finds our time wanting in many ways.
Building on Being a Beast (2016), in which he looked at the world through the viewpoints of badgers, a fox, and other critters, Foster imagines a humdrum deep past in which not much happened until around the Stone Age, when some mysterious spark fired our imaginations. As he writes, “God is good and favours the Upper Palaeolithic,” and its inhabitants responded to that goodness by painting glorious works of art in hard-to-get-to places, placing their dead in carefully constructed graves, and building cultures. That age of metaphor and creation, of “self-creation and self-knowing,” came crashing down in the Neolithic, which brought us agriculture and urbanization. “In the Neolithic,” Foster laments, “we started to get boring and miserable,” controlled in all sorts of ways. Instead of moving through the land, knowing what to hunt and what to gather and paying close attention to our surroundings, we became machines of labor. The author offers a provocative, pleasing meditation on the different ways in which the two stages of human evolution made use of fire—one to create, one to destroy—and he cleverly links the Neolithic world of overcrowding, forced labor, taxation, epidemic disease, and other woes to our time: “Continue synergistically for 12,000 years or so, and you have us.” This is a magpie book full of intriguing anthropological sketches. On one page, Foster notes that a circular house “is an intrinsically democratic space,” and on another, that the Romans were more interested in nature than were the Greeks. Throughout, the author makes connections between minds past and present with the “more-than-human world.” It’s a book that fits neatly into the growing library of modern British natural history writing, alongside the best of Nan Shepherd, Robert Macfarlane, and Roger Deakin.
A splendid assessment of the many ways there are to be a person, for good and ill.
