Being a Human

By Charles Foster,

Book cover of Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness

Book description

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ATLANTIC, KIRKUS REVIEWS, AND NEW STATESMAN

A radically immersive exploration of three pivotal moments in the evolution of human consciousness, asking what kinds of creatures humans were, are, and might yet be

How did humans come to be who we are?…

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Why read it?

3 authors picked Being a Human as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Foster is incapable of writing a boring sentence. He's not only madder than a coot, he's also brilliant. Nobody else would dream up such a project: to try and live as a human from different time periods, experiencing the stream of consciousness of a highly erudite modern human stripped of all of the appurtenances of modern life. It's a fascinating experiment, as was Being Animal, in which he lived as various native UK animals, and the account he creates, with all the interesting diverticulae, is equally so. For fans of playing with language and ideas, and anyone who likes sidelong…

Incredible intersting, by an author who knows so much, but dares to feel even more.

A raw and bloody gem of a book, which plunges the reader into the cold and dirty world of our deep past, not just seen but experienced by its multi-talented author.

A philosophical hankering to know what it means to be human – and what we have inherited from our evolutionary past -leads this trained veterinarian, barrister, and writer to go back to nature in a Derbyshire wood. He and his long-suffering son experience the freezing, claw-red, and skin-tearing nature of the wild, as they seek to live similarly to our prehistoric ancestors.

Drawing inspiration from the 40,000 years of…

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Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

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Citizen Scientist begins with this extraordinary statement by the Keeper of Entomology at the London Museum of Natural History, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than anyone else on the planet.”

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