Why did I love this book?
Abram’s 1997 book, The Spell of the Sensuous, is (in my humble opinion) one of the most important works in American environmental ethics. Abram helps us understand how we have become so disconnected from nature. His second book, Becoming Animal, tries to help us overcome this disconnection through enlivening our sensory, our sensual experience of the world. I am still learning how to distinguish the sound of wind passing through a pine from the sound of wind passing through a spruce.
2 authors picked Becoming Animal as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
David Abram’s first book, The Spell of the Sensuous has become a classic of environmental literature. Now he returns with a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature.
As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we’ve ignored the wild intelligence of our bodies, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. Abram’s writing subverts this distance, drawing readers ever closer to their animal senses in order…