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by Charles Foster (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
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'A wonderful, wild, dazzling book. You will feel more human for having read it' Tom Whyman, Literary Review
'Foster's daringly imaginative exploration of alternative models of selfhood is an original and beneficial way of grappling with history ... precisely what we need to remind us that there are many alternatives to the "I, me, mine" mindset' Anna Katharina Schaffner, TLS
What kind of creature is a human? If we don't know what we are, how can we know how to act? 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 with his son in a Derbyshire wood, trying to find a way of experiencing the world that recognises the deep expanse of time when we understood ourselves as hunter-gatherers, and when modern consciousness was first ignited. From there he travels to the Neolithic, a way of being defined by fences, farms, sky gods and slaughterhouses, and finally to the Enlightenment, when we decided that the universe was a machine and we were soulless cogs within it.
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Print length
393 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
"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--This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Charles Foster is the author of Being a Beast, which won the 2016 Ig Nobel Award for biology and was a finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize. He teaches medical law and ethics at the University of Oxford and his writing has been published in National Geographic, the Guardian, Nautilus, Slate, the Journal of Medical Ethics and many other venues. He lives in Oxford, England. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
Product details
ASIN : B08P81723M
Publisher : Profile Books; Main edition (August 26, 2021)
Publication date : August 26, 2021
Language : English
File size : 5819 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 393 pages
Lending : Not EnabledBest Sellers Rank: #1,672,335 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)#4,829 in Anthropology (Kindle Store)
#5,991 in General Anthropology
#14,349 in Politics & Social Sciences (Kindle Store)Customer Reviews:
4.2 out of 5 stars 50 ratings
Charles Foster
I'm a writer based in Oxford, UK and a remote part of the souther Peloponnese. I'm a Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, and my academic research is concerned mainly with questions of identity, personhood and authenticity. Most of my books are presumptuous and more or less unsuccessful attempts to work out what we are doing on this extraordinary planet. Those attempts have generated books on anthropology, natural history, evolutionary biology, the physiology of spiritual experience, pilgrimage, archaeology, theology and ethics, as well as travel books.
I'm a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Linnean Society, and have particular passions for waves, foxes, mountains, deer, deserts and the Byzantine world.
I have a very long-suffering wife, Mary, and six wondrous, wild children: Lizzie, Sally, Tom, James, Rachel and Jonny
My website is www.charlesfoster.co.uk. It would be great if you could drop by there. If you'd like to email me to tell me how badly I've got things wrong in my books, I'm at tweedpipe@aol.com
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W. Bonkosky
3.0 out of 5 stars Different tastesReviewed in the United States on September 28, 2021
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Now, look...
We all see things differently, and like different things, and the huge number of different cars available in different colors illustrates that perfectly. So consider that when reading and considering my opinion of this book.
I don't much like it.
I expected - and wanted - to read and learn a lot about the evolution of consciousness among the tribes and groups of 30-4,000 years ago. Instead, the author writes extensively about HIS trying to connect with the daily life-style of those early people by trying to live the way they did. OK, I can understand some of that, but that seems to be the bulk of the book.
And consider this as well: I'm only about halfway thru the book, so maybe what I was hoping for is in the last half. But, with the pattern I'm seeing so far, it doesn't make that likely.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth readingReviewed in the United States on September 13, 2021
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Good book and very helpful information.
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G. W. Hallin
1.0 out of 5 stars Another Romanticist Anti-Science ScreedReviewed in the United States on December 17, 2021
Frustrating read if you believe in science and evolutionary psychology- Another Romanticist who desperately wants to believe in magic, is fervently anti-Enlightenment, trusts emotions over empiric fact, and makes the usual mistake of conflating science with industry but then actually (on page301) goes on to conflate science with 17th Century Christianity in its foolish belief system separating mankind from the rest of the natural world. Shocking.
Author says Richard Dawkins, who probably has done more to appreciate our place in the natural world than any other humans on the planet, is an "embarrassment." Enough said. Read this only if you if you want to continue living in a Romantic bubble, unaware of reality and therefore unable to do a thing about it.
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Joshua E.
5.0 out of 5 stars Both Fascinating and InspiringReviewed in the United States on October 26, 2021
Incredible read from an incredible author! Charles Foster has taken what seems virtually impossible: He has written a beautiful account of human history across tens of thousands of years ago. In fact, I will be reading his other book and am unsure as to why his books do not currently have more reviews. Do yourself a favor and read this book. You will be left both fascinated and inspired! Thank you to Metropolitan Books and NetGalley for furnishing this book in exchange for an honest review.
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C. M. E. Beckingham
5.0 out of 5 stars Another ambitious and fascinating five star read, from Charles Foster.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 16, 2021
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This enthralling read and follow up to ‘Being a Beast,’ uses a different formula, (more Pirsig sans motorbike this time). Although it is just as erudite, intelligent and witty.
Creating a plausible, informative tract by distilling 40,000 years of human history into about 100,000 words sounds inconceivable. However, this is a journey through history without dates (no mention of 1066), ‘historical’ events (no battles or treaties) and famous people (no Leonardo or Henry VIII). It becomes possible by using ideas from disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, economics, politics, sociology, geography and psychology to explain the evolution of human culture and perhaps, even the meaning of life (certainly the essence). In doing so, it reveals (or seeks to) why so many of us in the modern world struggle with anomie and alienation, as we seek to find some kind of meaning, for ourselves.
It’s up to the reader to take what they want from this book. Some, like Professor Black (who you will meet in later chapters), will balk at the idea that the ‘age of rationalism’ is a scourge and that modern religion and materialism are poor substitutes for the respect and empathy for nature we begun to lose at the end of the last Ice Age, when our species started to settle in one place and farm instead of wandering as hunter gatherers. However, my sympathies though are with Tom and X who understand the critical importance of our fragile relationships with nature.
This should be quite a depressing book. It is after all a description of decadence and the failure of human society. But it isn’t. It is both enlightening and a joy to read. And now… I’m going to read it again.
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Terry Simpson
5.0 out of 5 stars Strange fascinating readReviewed in the United Kingdom on October 22, 2021
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It seems impossible to imagine what consciousness might have been like in deep pre-history, but this is a very entertaining account of an attempt to do just that, and a strong critique of what we've lost in the modern world.
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Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness
by
Charles Foster (Goodreads Author)
3.70 · Rating details · 171 ratings · 37 reviews
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? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps the strangest animal of all--the human being.
To experience the Upper Paleolithic era--a turning point when humans became behaviorally modern, painting caves and telling stories, Foster learns what it feels like to be a Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer by living in makeshift shelters without amenities in the rural woods of England. He tests his five impoverished senses to forage for berries and roadkill and he undertakes shamanic journeys to explore the connection of wakeful dreaming to religion. For the Neolithic period, when humans stayed in one place and domesticated plants and animals, forever altering our connection to the natural world, he moves to a reconstructed Neolithic settlement. Finally, to explore the Enlightenment--the age of reason and the end of the soul--Foster inspects Oxford colleges, dissecting rooms, cafes, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rues the atrophy of our senses, the cause for much of what ails us.
Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, natural history, agriculture, medical law and ethics, Being a Human is one man's audacious attempt to feel a connection with 45,000 years of human history. This glorious, fiercely imaginative journey from our origins to a possible future ultimately shows how we might best live on earth--and thrive. (less)
Hardcover, 400 pages
Published August 31st 2021 by Metropolitan Books (first published August 24th
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Sep 13, 2021Will Byrnes rated it it was amazing
Shelves: 2021-nonfiction-reader-challenge, psychology-and-the-brain, brain-candy, natural-history, nature, religion-and-sprituality, psychology, adventuring, books-of-the-year-2021, science
We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switched off we are. A country walk should be a deafening, threatening, frantic, exhausting cacophony.
If today’s shorn, burned, poisoned apology for wilderness should do that to us, just think what the real wild, if it still existed, would do. It’d be like taking an industrial cocktail of speed, heroin and LSD and dancing through a club that’s playing the Mozart Requiem to the beat of the Grateful Dead, expecting every moment to have your belly unzipped by a cave bear.--------------------------------------
All humans are Sheherazades: we die each morning if we don’t have a good story to tell, and the good ones are all old.Up for a bit of time travel? No, no, no, not in the sci-fi sense of physically transporting to another era. But in the mostly imaginary sense of picturing oneself in a prior age. Well, maybe more than just picturing, maybe picturing with the addition of some visceral experience. Charles Foster has written about what life is like for otters, badgers, foxes, deer and swifts, by living like them for a time. He wrote about those experiences in his book, Being a Beast. He wonders, here, how experiencing life as a Paleolithic and a Neolithic person can inform our current understanding of ourselves.
I thought that, if I knew where I came from, that might shed some light on what I am…It’s a prolonged thought experiment and non-thought experiment, set in woods, waves, moorlands, schools, abattoirs, wattle-and-daub huts, hospitals, rivers, cemeteries, caves, farms, kitchens, the bodies of crows, museums, breaches, laboratories, medieval dining halls, Basque eating houses, fox-hunts, temples, deserted Middle Eastern cities and shaman’s caravans.
Charles Foster - image from Oxford University
His journey begins with (and he spends the largest portion of the book on) the Upper Paleolithic (U-P) era, aka the Late Stone Age, from 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, when we became, behaviorally, modern humans. Foster is quite a fan of the period, seeing it as some sort of romantic heyday for humanity, one in which we were more fully attuned with the environments in which we lived, able to use our senses to their capacity, instead of getting by with the vastly circumscribed functionality we have today.
Interested in the birth of human consciousness, he puts himself, and his 12 yo son, Tom, not only into the mindset of late Paleolithic humans, but into their lives. He and Tom live wild in Derbyshire, doing their best to ignore the sounds of passing traffic, while living on roadkill (well, I guess they do not entirely ignore traffic) and the bounty of the woods. They deal with hunger, the need for shelter, and work on becoming attuned to their new old world.
We’re not making the wood into our image: projecting ourselves onto it. It’s making us. If we let it.In one stretch Foster fasts for eight days, which helps bring on a hallucinatory state (intentionally). Shamanism is a major cultural element in the U-P portrait he paints. It is clearly not his first trip. He recalls an out-of-body experience he had while in hospital, the sort where one is looking down from the ceiling at one’s physical body, seeing this as of a cloth with a broader capacity for human experience. He relates this also to the cave paintings of the era, seeing them, possibly, as the end-product of shamanic tripping. This section of the book transported me back to the 1960s and the probably apocryphal books of Carlos Castaneda.
Social grooming was important to ancestors of our species. But, with our enlarged brains able to handle, maybe, a community of 150 people, grooming became too cost-intensive.
To maintain a group that size strictly by grooming, we’d have to groom for about 43% percent of our time, which would be deadly. Something else had to make up for the shortfall, and other things have. We have developed a number of other endorphin-releasing, bond-forming strategies that don’t involve touching [social distancing?]. They are…laughter, wordless singing/dancing, language and ritual/religion/story.It sure gives the expression rubbed me the wrong way some added heft.
He has theories about religion, communication, and social organization that permeate this exploration. He posits, for example, that late Paleo man was able to communicate with a language unlike our own, a more full-body form of expression, maybe some long-lost form of charades. There is an ancient language, thought to have been used by Neanderthals, called HMMM, or holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and memetic communication. It is likely that some of this carried forward. And makes one wonder just how far back the roots go to contemporary languages that incorporate more rather than less musicality, more rather than less tonality, and more rather than less bodily support for spoken words.
He writes about a time when everything, not just people, were seen as having a soul, some inner self that exists separately, although living within a body, a tree, a hare, a blade of grass. This sort of worldview makes it a lot tougher to hunt for reasons that did not involve survival. And makes understandable rituals in many cultures in which forgiveness is begged when an animal is killed. This becomes much more of a thing when one feels in tune with one’s surroundings, an experience Foster reports as being quite real in his Derbyshire adventure. This tells him that Paleo man was better able to sense, to be aware of his surroundings than almost any modern human can.
Foster has a go at the Neolithic as well, trying to see what the shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture was like, and offers consideration of the longer-term impacts on humanity that emanated from that change. This is much less involved and involving, but does include some very interesting observations on how agriculture revolutionized the relationship people had with their environment.
…the first evidence of sedentary communities comes from around 11,000 years ago. We see the first evidence of domesticated plants and animals at about the same time. Yet, it is not for another 7,000 years that there are settled villages, relying on domesticated plants or fixed fields. For 7,000 years, that is, our own model of human life, which we like to assume would have been irresistibly attractive to the poor benighted caveman, was resisted or ignored, just as it is by more modern hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers only become like us at the end of a whip. Our life is a last resort for the creatures that we really are.He notes that even when farming took root, many of those newly minted farmers continued living as hunter-gatherers for part of the year.
He finishes up with a glance at the contemporary. More of a screed really. He notes that phonetic writing severed the connection our languages have with the reality they seek to portray. Pre-phonetic languages tend to be more onomatopoeic, the sounds more closely reflecting the underlying reality. He sees our modern brains as functioning mostly as valves, channeling all available sensation through a narrow pipeline, while leaving behind an entire world of possible human experience that we are no longer equipped to handle. To that extent we all have super-powers, of potential awareness, anyway, that lie waiting for someone to open the right valve, presuming they have not been corroded into inutility by disuse. He tells of meeting a French woman in Thailand whose near-death experience left her passively able to disrupt electronic mechanisms. She could not, for example, use ATMs. They would always malfunction around her.
He takes a run at what is usually seen to indicate “modern” humanity.
I’ve come to wonder whether symbolism is all it’s cracked up to be, and in particular whether its use really is the great watershed separating us from everything else that had gone before.He argues that trackers, for example, can abstract from natural clues the stories behind them, and those existed long before so-called “modern man.”
He calls in outside authorities from time to time to fill in gaps. These extra bits always add fascinating pieces of information. For example,
Later I wrote in panic to biologist David Haskell, an expert on birdsong, begging him to reassure me that music is ‘chronologically and neurologically prior to language.’ It surely is, he replied. ‘It seems that preceding both is bodily motion: the sound-controlling centers of the brain are derived from the same parts of the embryo as the limb motor system, so all vocal expression grows from the roots that might be called dance or, less loftily, shuffling about.Foster is that most common of writers, a veterinarian and a lawyer. Wait, what? Sadly, there is no telling in here (it is present in his Wiki page, though) of how he managed to train for these seemingly unrelated careers. (I can certainly envision a scenario, though, in which we hear lawyer Foster proclaiming to the court, “My client could not possibly be guilty of this crime, your honor. The forensic evidence at the scene clearly shows that the act was committed by an American badger, while my client, as anyone can see, is a Eurasian badger.”) It certainly seems clear, though, from his diatribes against modernity, where his heart is. In the visceral, physical work of dealing with animals, which lends itself to the intellectual stimulation of a truer, and deeper connection with nature.
The first time (and one of the only times) I felt useful was shoveling cow shit in a Peak District farm when I was ten. It had a dignity that piano lessons, cub scouts, arithmetic and even amateur taxidermy did not. What I was detecting was that humans acquire their significance from relationship, that relationships with non-humans were vital and that clearing up someone’s dung is a good way of establishing relationships.In that case, I am far more useful in the world than I ever dreamed.
GRIPES
Foster can be off-putting, particularly to those us with no love of hunting, opening as he does with I first ate a live mammal on a Scottish hill. (Well, as least it wasn’t haggis.) I can well imagine many readers slamming the book shut at that point and moving on to something else. Will this be a paean to a manly killing impulse? Thankfully, not really, although there are some uncomfortable moments re the hunting of living creatures.
Sometimes he puts things out that are at the very least questionable, and at the worst, silly. Our intuition is older, wiser and more reliable than our underused, atrophied senses. Really? Based on what data? So, making decisions by feelz alone is the way to go? Maybe I should swap my accountant for an inveterate gambler?
He sometimes betrays an unconscious unkindness in the cloak of humor:
The last thing I ate was a hedgehog. That was nine days ago. From the taste of them, hedgehogs must start decomposing even when they’re alive and in their prime. This one’s still down there somewhere, and my burps smell like a maggot farm. I regret it’s death under the wheels of a cattle truck far more than its parents or children possibly do.I doubt it.
One stylistic element that permeates is seeing an imaginary Paleo man, X, and his son. Supposedly these might be Foster and Tom in an earlier era. It has some artistic appeal, but I did not think it added much overall.
All that said, the overall take here is that this is high-octane fuel for the brain, however valved-up ours may be. Foster raises many incredibly fascinating subjects from the origins of religion, language, our native capabilities to how global revolutions have molded us into the homo sap of the 21st century. This is a stunning wakeup call for any minds that might have drifted off into the intellectual somnolence of contemporary life. There are simply so many ideas bouncing off the walls in this book that one might fear that they could reach a critical mass and do some damage. It is worth the risk. If you care at all about understanding humanity, our place in the world, and how we got here, skipping Being a Human would be…well…inhuman. It is an absolute must-read.
We try to learn the liturgy: the way to do things properly; the way to avoid offending the fastidious, prescriptive and vengeful guardians of the place. Everything matters. We watch the rain fall on one leaf, trace the course of the water under a stone, and then we go back to the leaf and watch the next drop. We try to know the stamens with the visual resolution of a bumblebee and the snail slime with the nose of a bankvole and the leaf pennants on the tree masts with the cold eyes of kites.
Review posted – 9/17/21
Publication date – 8/31/21
This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!
I received an ARE of Being a Human from Metropolitan Books in return for a modern era review. Thanks, Maia.
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, and Twitter pages
By my count this is Foster’s 39th book
Foster’s bio on Wiki
Charles Foster (born 1962) is an English writer, traveller, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister and philosopher. He is known for his books and articles on Natural History, travel (particularly in Africa and the Middle East), theology, law and medical ethics. He is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. He says of his own books: 'Ultimately they are all presumptuous and unsuccessful attempts to answer the questions 'who or what are we?', and 'what on earth are we doing here?'Interviews
-----The Guardian - Going underground: meet the man who lived as an animal - re Being a Beast by Simon Hattenston
-----New Books Network - Defined by Relationship by Howard Burton – audio - 1h 30m
Items of Interest from the author
-----Emergence Magazine - Against Nature Writing - on language as a barrier to understanding
-----Shortform - Charles Foster's Top Book Recommendations
Items of Interest
-----Wiki on Bear Grylls - a British adventurer – mentioned in Part 1 as an example of someone more interested in the technology of survival than the point of it (p 62 in my ARE)
-----Wiki on Yggdrasil - mentioned in Part 1 – humorously (p 85)
-----Wiki on the Upper Paleolithic
-----Dartmouth Department of Music – a review of a book positing that Neanderthals used musicality in their communications Review Feature - The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body by Steven Mithen - Foster addresses this in this discussion of the origins of human language
-----Wiki on Carlos Castaneda
-----Discover Magazine - Paleomythic: How People Really Lived During the Stone Age By Marlene Zuk Like it says – an interesting read (less)
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Nov 04, 2021Veronica Watson rated it liked it
I wrote a long review and accidentally deleted it. So an effort not to have to write the whole thing over again I will be a bit more to the point. I had two issues with this book. One, although subjectivity is to be expected in any assessment of History the extent of subjectivity in this book, really romanticizing the lives of upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, is too starry eyed for my taste. Evolution is responsive and adaptable, it is not teological. There is no best human possible, no true human, garden of Eden lost innocence. These are remnants of a reactionary, quasi religious attitudes. Civilizations and society have their own cycles which do not follow collective intentions from point A to point B.
I can certainly agree that several of the adaptations civilization took on as a result of the agricultural and industrial revolutions have been detrimental in the Modern Mind, it's only from a viewpoint of hindsight. We have the benefit of standing on our modern sensibility outside as a spectator while we evaluate the left turns we took as a species. We cannot judge from within their experiences. In some ways, we can lament the worst of our modern lives without contrasting heavily with an idealized beautiful past, one free from brutalizing elements, short lives, and tenuous existence... can we not? Calibrate.
Secondly, it just wasn't very original. When you read a lot of nonfiction you start to hear the same scholarship referenced again and again. He draws heavily from Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Sapiens, Iain Gilchrist, David Abram and other writers. And although he synthesizes this into a very personal journal of his experiences of trying to inhabit the minds of hunter gatherers through the Enlightenment, all his premises are unthoughtful or rehashed. I'm not trying to be unfairly critical, it's not god awful bad, but I just have heard it before. His prose had it moments but most of it was dull. I almost marked this did-not-finish as I found it boring but since it was not a long read I decided to plow through. Now, this can only be my opinion, philosophy and specific taste. After all, it's completely what you're bringing to the book you're reading, is it relevant to you or not? Many might enjoy this book depending on what you are looking for. (less)
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Aug 31, 2021Kristine rated it liked it
Being a Human by Charles Foster is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in early August.
Foster takes a deep, near-poetic intellectual tone (with a twinge of wit) when describing early humankind through the ages and the concepts of hunting, cave art, migration. shamanic rituals and prophecy, intercommunication, and higher thought through written language. It has the potential to be really great if it didn't ponder or hypothesize as much. Maybe this means I'd like Being a Beast more? (less)
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Nov 12, 2021Luke Beane rated it it was ok
This book was extremely frustrating.
I suppose I was under the impression that I'd be getting something very different out of it having found it in the science section. Expectations aside, the author managed to attempt a fresh look at the human conscious experience through the various stages in our history from hunter-gatherers to the modern industrial world.
It seemed to me like an novel idea and approach were there, I just felt constantly conflicted while reading. The prose was kind of fun, smooth, entertaining and unique. And yet it was also wandering, feeling often aimless in it's meandering between pedantic rants, spiritual, waxing poetic ideologies, and long bouts about their father-son camping trips. As a matter of fact, a lot of this book seems to me to be about them going camping and then drawing enormous, overzealous conclusions. I would find myself starring paragraphs feeling enthralled by the simplicity and beauty of certain re-conceptions of human history and thought just to be angered by misrepresented science on the next page. I went back and forth between enjoying the book, to wanting to throw it across the room.
What really bothered me was that the author was attempting this anti-progress perspective to attack our conceptions of the use of rationality, science, and language while at the same time deploying scientific endeavors and about as many big words as he could muster to make the argument. It was as if he was against language as a tool for knowledge while simultaneously enjoying the deployment of his linguistic skills and literary references in this flaunting academic onanism. Couldn't you speak more plainly if your desire is to convey the simple elegance of nature and of the people that were more in tune with it rather than act upset about the very thing you yourself are perpetrating?
Yes, I know that the author was aware of his own inundation in the very world he argued against. I just wanted there to be more balance and honesty rather than what felt like self-annihilating, cover up, romanticized rambling around what was essentially a series of camping trips and hikes. The title itself was laced with this pretension and the introduction or whatever it is clearly states this incredibly difficult and interesting objective in a well-written and concise way. It's a great sales pitch that just didn't quite come through for me.
Like I said, I'm at least partially with you here though, Charles. Dogma doesn't belong in science or history and much of what you say is quite appealing. I really enjoyed that cringey portion about the dinner with the professor. Very courageous. However, there are many points that I must disagree with at this moment, especially with regard to your conception of some pure beginning, of some imagined moment in human history of complete harmony with nature and purity of spirit. This idea itself in the child of the Christian narrative of the fall of man. So re-vamping this story as man's fall from nature is non-unique and extremely contestable.
Here's my distilled take away:
This book has decent snippets that are good to think about. It's a novel way to conceptualize human history and consciousness through experiential and philosophical lens. It is also a book that is mostly about going camping. Clear in objective and then vague throughout the execution.
This book is something to read and discuss, approached with a grain of salt. I would give it two and half stars if I could because it belongs right at the intersection of good and bad.
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Sep 10, 2021Paul rated it it was amazing
Absolutely stunning. Read this book. Quit your job. Go outside.
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Sep 01, 2021Annie rated it it was amazing
Shelves: netgalley
Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.
Being a Human is a meandering nearly stream-of-consciousness look at human development over the last forty thousand (or so) years and examining three ages of human-ness along the way. Released 31st Aug 2021 by Macmillan on their Metropolitan imprint, it's 400 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately; it makes it so easy to find information with the search function.
This is an eccentric book; beautifully written and oddly moving in a lot of places. The prose is a lot more prose-like than most nonfiction books I've encountered and I enjoyed the cadence of the author's voice very much. I can imagine that he would be outside the usual standard-operating-fare as a lecturer, and I envy his students. He manages to traverse the metaphorical Strait of Messina without straying into "aw, shucks" self deprecation or pedagogical pomposity, no mean feat.
The book covers a massive amount of time (obviously) and is arranged more or less chronologically: Upper Paleolithic (in four parts), Neolithic (ditto), and the current age looking toward the future. I found myself continually distracted during the reading by the enlightening and copious annotations and notes. After the first bit, I decided to ignore the notes and links and just read the information, making notes of the bits I really wanted to delve into more deeply later. That seemed to really help with continuity and flow and reading enjoyment.
As stated, the book is copiously annotated and the chapter notes provide a wealth of further reading for readers wishing to deep dive in the material. The bibliography is massive (though, as the author says, impossibly abbreviated since a real bibliography would include everything ever written by or about human beings).
I enjoyed this read immensely. I would heartily recommend it for lovers of science philosophy, anthropology, but maybe not so much for readers looking for "just the facts, Ma'am". This has been one of my better nonfiction reads for 2021.
Five stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes. (less)
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Aug 21, 2021B. rated it liked it
I won an ARC of this one in a Goodreads Giveaway. There are a lot of stream of consciousness ramblings on the part of the author, which isn't something that I typically associate with non-fiction. I was hoping for a more academic take on the exploration of consciousness when I entered the giveaway for this one, and I have to admit that the lack of a scholarly tone to the book was a real bummer. There's still some fascinating information in here, but it's not the book for me. It comes off as though it's being written in a blog-like format, and that's not something I have an interest in keeping on my shelves. (less)
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May 25, 2021James Orton rated it it was amazing
This is an incredibly special book. Beautifully descriptive nature writing exploring the origins of consciousness via three periods in our evolution. Part memoir, philosophy and anthropology, this is ideal for anybody that enjoyed ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and ‘The Songlines’. A wonderful piece of writing that will leave you exhilarated and excited for the where the next 40,000 years will take us.
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Jun 10, 2022Toby Newton rated it it was amazing
Really a wonderful book. This was what I imagined Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance would be but so absolutely wasn't - a truly impassioned, sometimes blisteringly insightful, always interesting, occasionally angry, often poetic, orgy of beingness. Where Zen is plodding and shrill and alienating, Being a Human is lithe and teasing and resonant.
Knowledgeable, courageous, ludic (if not lunatic), compelling, and with a beautiful turn of phrase. I put this amongst the ranks of my fifty Top Ten books.
Thank you, very much, Mr Foster. (less)
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Mar 28, 2022Amy rated it it was amazing
Foster's radically experiential and immersive methods of investigation into the minds of paleolithic and neolithic humans become the foundation of an argument for ecstatic mysticism.
If we go into the woods ad the rivers and the hills and the sees with all this, the wild will feel appreciated. It will know we're trying, and will start to come out and introduce itself. And since you are part of the wild, you should brace yourself for an encounter with yourself." p. 328 (less)
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Sep 24, 2021Mayda (My Book Cafe Life) rated it really liked it
“We are people who needs stories, as we need air…”
Being Human by Charles Foster was an interesting read. The book is philosophical and poetic. It discusses mankind’s relationship with mother nature as we journey through history without specific dates. Exploring the consciousness via three periods of our evolution, Paleolithic, Neolithic and Enlightenment. It also includes subjects about the origins of religion and language.
Full Review over at https://mybookcafelife.com
**I received this book in exchange for an honest review** (less)
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Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness
by
Charles Foster (Goodreads Author)
3.70 · Rating details · 171 ratings · 37 reviews
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? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps the strangest animal of all--the human being.
To experience the Upper Paleolithic era--a turning point when humans became behaviorally modern, painting caves and telling stories, Foster learns what it feels like to be a Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer by living in makeshift shelters without amenities in the rural woods of England. He tests his five impoverished senses to forage for berries and roadkill and he undertakes shamanic journeys to explore the connection of wakeful dreaming to religion. For the Neolithic period, when humans stayed in one place and domesticated plants and animals, forever altering our connection to the natural world, he moves to a reconstructed Neolithic settlement. Finally, to explore the Enlightenment--the age of reason and the end of the soul--Foster inspects Oxford colleges, dissecting rooms, cafes, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rues the atrophy of our senses, the cause for much of what ails us.
Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, natural history, agriculture, medical law and ethics, Being a Human is one man's audacious attempt to feel a connection with 45,000 years of human history. This glorious, fiercely imaginative journey from our origins to a possible future ultimately shows how we might best live on earth--and thrive. (less)
Hardcover, 400 pages
Published August 31st 2021 by Metropolitan Books (first published August 24th
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Sep 13, 2021Will Byrnes rated it it was amazing
Shelves: 2021-nonfiction-reader-challenge, psychology-and-the-brain, brain-candy, natural-history, nature, religion-and-sprituality, psychology, adventuring, books-of-the-year-2021, science
We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switched off we are. A country walk should be a deafening, threatening, frantic, exhausting cacophony.
If today’s shorn, burned, poisoned apology for wilderness should do that to us, just think what the real wild, if it still existed, would do. It’d be like taking an industrial cocktail of speed, heroin and LSD and dancing through a club that’s playing the Mozart Requiem to the beat of the Grateful Dead, expecting every moment to have your belly unzipped by a cave bear.--------------------------------------
All humans are Sheherazades: we die each morning if we don’t have a good story to tell, and the good ones are all old.Up for a bit of time travel? No, no, no, not in the sci-fi sense of physically transporting to another era. But in the mostly imaginary sense of picturing oneself in a prior age. Well, maybe more than just picturing, maybe picturing with the addition of some visceral experience. Charles Foster has written about what life is like for otters, badgers, foxes, deer and swifts, by living like them for a time. He wrote about those experiences in his book, Being a Beast. He wonders, here, how experiencing life as a Paleolithic and a Neolithic person can inform our current understanding of ourselves.
I thought that, if I knew where I came from, that might shed some light on what I am…It’s a prolonged thought experiment and non-thought experiment, set in woods, waves, moorlands, schools, abattoirs, wattle-and-daub huts, hospitals, rivers, cemeteries, caves, farms, kitchens, the bodies of crows, museums, breaches, laboratories, medieval dining halls, Basque eating houses, fox-hunts, temples, deserted Middle Eastern cities and shaman’s caravans.
Charles Foster - image from Oxford University
His journey begins with (and he spends the largest portion of the book on) the Upper Paleolithic (U-P) era, aka the Late Stone Age, from 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, when we became, behaviorally, modern humans. Foster is quite a fan of the period, seeing it as some sort of romantic heyday for humanity, one in which we were more fully attuned with the environments in which we lived, able to use our senses to their capacity, instead of getting by with the vastly circumscribed functionality we have today.
Interested in the birth of human consciousness, he puts himself, and his 12 yo son, Tom, not only into the mindset of late Paleolithic humans, but into their lives. He and Tom live wild in Derbyshire, doing their best to ignore the sounds of passing traffic, while living on roadkill (well, I guess they do not entirely ignore traffic) and the bounty of the woods. They deal with hunger, the need for shelter, and work on becoming attuned to their new old world.
We’re not making the wood into our image: projecting ourselves onto it. It’s making us. If we let it.In one stretch Foster fasts for eight days, which helps bring on a hallucinatory state (intentionally). Shamanism is a major cultural element in the U-P portrait he paints. It is clearly not his first trip. He recalls an out-of-body experience he had while in hospital, the sort where one is looking down from the ceiling at one’s physical body, seeing this as of a cloth with a broader capacity for human experience. He relates this also to the cave paintings of the era, seeing them, possibly, as the end-product of shamanic tripping. This section of the book transported me back to the 1960s and the probably apocryphal books of Carlos Castaneda.
Social grooming was important to ancestors of our species. But, with our enlarged brains able to handle, maybe, a community of 150 people, grooming became too cost-intensive.
To maintain a group that size strictly by grooming, we’d have to groom for about 43% percent of our time, which would be deadly. Something else had to make up for the shortfall, and other things have. We have developed a number of other endorphin-releasing, bond-forming strategies that don’t involve touching [social distancing?]. They are…laughter, wordless singing/dancing, language and ritual/religion/story.It sure gives the expression rubbed me the wrong way some added heft.
He has theories about religion, communication, and social organization that permeate this exploration. He posits, for example, that late Paleo man was able to communicate with a language unlike our own, a more full-body form of expression, maybe some long-lost form of charades. There is an ancient language, thought to have been used by Neanderthals, called HMMM, or holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and memetic communication. It is likely that some of this carried forward. And makes one wonder just how far back the roots go to contemporary languages that incorporate more rather than less musicality, more rather than less tonality, and more rather than less bodily support for spoken words.
He writes about a time when everything, not just people, were seen as having a soul, some inner self that exists separately, although living within a body, a tree, a hare, a blade of grass. This sort of worldview makes it a lot tougher to hunt for reasons that did not involve survival. And makes understandable rituals in many cultures in which forgiveness is begged when an animal is killed. This becomes much more of a thing when one feels in tune with one’s surroundings, an experience Foster reports as being quite real in his Derbyshire adventure. This tells him that Paleo man was better able to sense, to be aware of his surroundings than almost any modern human can.
Foster has a go at the Neolithic as well, trying to see what the shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture was like, and offers consideration of the longer-term impacts on humanity that emanated from that change. This is much less involved and involving, but does include some very interesting observations on how agriculture revolutionized the relationship people had with their environment.
…the first evidence of sedentary communities comes from around 11,000 years ago. We see the first evidence of domesticated plants and animals at about the same time. Yet, it is not for another 7,000 years that there are settled villages, relying on domesticated plants or fixed fields. For 7,000 years, that is, our own model of human life, which we like to assume would have been irresistibly attractive to the poor benighted caveman, was resisted or ignored, just as it is by more modern hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers only become like us at the end of a whip. Our life is a last resort for the creatures that we really are.He notes that even when farming took root, many of those newly minted farmers continued living as hunter-gatherers for part of the year.
He finishes up with a glance at the contemporary. More of a screed really. He notes that phonetic writing severed the connection our languages have with the reality they seek to portray. Pre-phonetic languages tend to be more onomatopoeic, the sounds more closely reflecting the underlying reality. He sees our modern brains as functioning mostly as valves, channeling all available sensation through a narrow pipeline, while leaving behind an entire world of possible human experience that we are no longer equipped to handle. To that extent we all have super-powers, of potential awareness, anyway, that lie waiting for someone to open the right valve, presuming they have not been corroded into inutility by disuse. He tells of meeting a French woman in Thailand whose near-death experience left her passively able to disrupt electronic mechanisms. She could not, for example, use ATMs. They would always malfunction around her.
He takes a run at what is usually seen to indicate “modern” humanity.
I’ve come to wonder whether symbolism is all it’s cracked up to be, and in particular whether its use really is the great watershed separating us from everything else that had gone before.He argues that trackers, for example, can abstract from natural clues the stories behind them, and those existed long before so-called “modern man.”
He calls in outside authorities from time to time to fill in gaps. These extra bits always add fascinating pieces of information. For example,
Later I wrote in panic to biologist David Haskell, an expert on birdsong, begging him to reassure me that music is ‘chronologically and neurologically prior to language.’ It surely is, he replied. ‘It seems that preceding both is bodily motion: the sound-controlling centers of the brain are derived from the same parts of the embryo as the limb motor system, so all vocal expression grows from the roots that might be called dance or, less loftily, shuffling about.Foster is that most common of writers, a veterinarian and a lawyer. Wait, what? Sadly, there is no telling in here (it is present in his Wiki page, though) of how he managed to train for these seemingly unrelated careers. (I can certainly envision a scenario, though, in which we hear lawyer Foster proclaiming to the court, “My client could not possibly be guilty of this crime, your honor. The forensic evidence at the scene clearly shows that the act was committed by an American badger, while my client, as anyone can see, is a Eurasian badger.”) It certainly seems clear, though, from his diatribes against modernity, where his heart is. In the visceral, physical work of dealing with animals, which lends itself to the intellectual stimulation of a truer, and deeper connection with nature.
The first time (and one of the only times) I felt useful was shoveling cow shit in a Peak District farm when I was ten. It had a dignity that piano lessons, cub scouts, arithmetic and even amateur taxidermy did not. What I was detecting was that humans acquire their significance from relationship, that relationships with non-humans were vital and that clearing up someone’s dung is a good way of establishing relationships.In that case, I am far more useful in the world than I ever dreamed.
GRIPES
Foster can be off-putting, particularly to those us with no love of hunting, opening as he does with I first ate a live mammal on a Scottish hill. (Well, as least it wasn’t haggis.) I can well imagine many readers slamming the book shut at that point and moving on to something else. Will this be a paean to a manly killing impulse? Thankfully, not really, although there are some uncomfortable moments re the hunting of living creatures.
Sometimes he puts things out that are at the very least questionable, and at the worst, silly. Our intuition is older, wiser and more reliable than our underused, atrophied senses. Really? Based on what data? So, making decisions by feelz alone is the way to go? Maybe I should swap my accountant for an inveterate gambler?
He sometimes betrays an unconscious unkindness in the cloak of humor:
The last thing I ate was a hedgehog. That was nine days ago. From the taste of them, hedgehogs must start decomposing even when they’re alive and in their prime. This one’s still down there somewhere, and my burps smell like a maggot farm. I regret it’s death under the wheels of a cattle truck far more than its parents or children possibly do.I doubt it.
One stylistic element that permeates is seeing an imaginary Paleo man, X, and his son. Supposedly these might be Foster and Tom in an earlier era. It has some artistic appeal, but I did not think it added much overall.
All that said, the overall take here is that this is high-octane fuel for the brain, however valved-up ours may be. Foster raises many incredibly fascinating subjects from the origins of religion, language, our native capabilities to how global revolutions have molded us into the homo sap of the 21st century. This is a stunning wakeup call for any minds that might have drifted off into the intellectual somnolence of contemporary life. There are simply so many ideas bouncing off the walls in this book that one might fear that they could reach a critical mass and do some damage. It is worth the risk. If you care at all about understanding humanity, our place in the world, and how we got here, skipping Being a Human would be…well…inhuman. It is an absolute must-read.
We try to learn the liturgy: the way to do things properly; the way to avoid offending the fastidious, prescriptive and vengeful guardians of the place. Everything matters. We watch the rain fall on one leaf, trace the course of the water under a stone, and then we go back to the leaf and watch the next drop. We try to know the stamens with the visual resolution of a bumblebee and the snail slime with the nose of a bankvole and the leaf pennants on the tree masts with the cold eyes of kites.
Review posted – 9/17/21
Publication date – 8/31/21
This review has been cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!
I received an ARE of Being a Human from Metropolitan Books in return for a modern era review. Thanks, Maia.
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, and Twitter pages
By my count this is Foster’s 39th book
Foster’s bio on Wiki
Charles Foster (born 1962) is an English writer, traveller, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister and philosopher. He is known for his books and articles on Natural History, travel (particularly in Africa and the Middle East), theology, law and medical ethics. He is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. He says of his own books: 'Ultimately they are all presumptuous and unsuccessful attempts to answer the questions 'who or what are we?', and 'what on earth are we doing here?'Interviews
-----The Guardian - Going underground: meet the man who lived as an animal - re Being a Beast by Simon Hattenston
-----New Books Network - Defined by Relationship by Howard Burton – audio - 1h 30m
Items of Interest from the author
-----Emergence Magazine - Against Nature Writing - on language as a barrier to understanding
-----Shortform - Charles Foster's Top Book Recommendations
Items of Interest
-----Wiki on Bear Grylls - a British adventurer – mentioned in Part 1 as an example of someone more interested in the technology of survival than the point of it (p 62 in my ARE)
-----Wiki on Yggdrasil - mentioned in Part 1 – humorously (p 85)
-----Wiki on the Upper Paleolithic
-----Dartmouth Department of Music – a review of a book positing that Neanderthals used musicality in their communications Review Feature - The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body by Steven Mithen - Foster addresses this in this discussion of the origins of human language
-----Wiki on Carlos Castaneda
-----Discover Magazine - Paleomythic: How People Really Lived During the Stone Age By Marlene Zuk Like it says – an interesting read (less)
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Nov 04, 2021Veronica Watson rated it liked it
I wrote a long review and accidentally deleted it. So an effort not to have to write the whole thing over again I will be a bit more to the point. I had two issues with this book. One, although subjectivity is to be expected in any assessment of History the extent of subjectivity in this book, really romanticizing the lives of upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, is too starry eyed for my taste. Evolution is responsive and adaptable, it is not teological. There is no best human possible, no true human, garden of Eden lost innocence. These are remnants of a reactionary, quasi religious attitudes. Civilizations and society have their own cycles which do not follow collective intentions from point A to point B.
I can certainly agree that several of the adaptations civilization took on as a result of the agricultural and industrial revolutions have been detrimental in the Modern Mind, it's only from a viewpoint of hindsight. We have the benefit of standing on our modern sensibility outside as a spectator while we evaluate the left turns we took as a species. We cannot judge from within their experiences. In some ways, we can lament the worst of our modern lives without contrasting heavily with an idealized beautiful past, one free from brutalizing elements, short lives, and tenuous existence... can we not? Calibrate.
Secondly, it just wasn't very original. When you read a lot of nonfiction you start to hear the same scholarship referenced again and again. He draws heavily from Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Sapiens, Iain Gilchrist, David Abram and other writers. And although he synthesizes this into a very personal journal of his experiences of trying to inhabit the minds of hunter gatherers through the Enlightenment, all his premises are unthoughtful or rehashed. I'm not trying to be unfairly critical, it's not god awful bad, but I just have heard it before. His prose had it moments but most of it was dull. I almost marked this did-not-finish as I found it boring but since it was not a long read I decided to plow through. Now, this can only be my opinion, philosophy and specific taste. After all, it's completely what you're bringing to the book you're reading, is it relevant to you or not? Many might enjoy this book depending on what you are looking for. (less)
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Aug 31, 2021Kristine rated it liked it
Being a Human by Charles Foster is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in early August.
Foster takes a deep, near-poetic intellectual tone (with a twinge of wit) when describing early humankind through the ages and the concepts of hunting, cave art, migration. shamanic rituals and prophecy, intercommunication, and higher thought through written language. It has the potential to be really great if it didn't ponder or hypothesize as much. Maybe this means I'd like Being a Beast more? (less)
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Nov 12, 2021Luke Beane rated it it was ok
This book was extremely frustrating.
I suppose I was under the impression that I'd be getting something very different out of it having found it in the science section. Expectations aside, the author managed to attempt a fresh look at the human conscious experience through the various stages in our history from hunter-gatherers to the modern industrial world.
It seemed to me like an novel idea and approach were there, I just felt constantly conflicted while reading. The prose was kind of fun, smooth, entertaining and unique. And yet it was also wandering, feeling often aimless in it's meandering between pedantic rants, spiritual, waxing poetic ideologies, and long bouts about their father-son camping trips. As a matter of fact, a lot of this book seems to me to be about them going camping and then drawing enormous, overzealous conclusions. I would find myself starring paragraphs feeling enthralled by the simplicity and beauty of certain re-conceptions of human history and thought just to be angered by misrepresented science on the next page. I went back and forth between enjoying the book, to wanting to throw it across the room.
What really bothered me was that the author was attempting this anti-progress perspective to attack our conceptions of the use of rationality, science, and language while at the same time deploying scientific endeavors and about as many big words as he could muster to make the argument. It was as if he was against language as a tool for knowledge while simultaneously enjoying the deployment of his linguistic skills and literary references in this flaunting academic onanism. Couldn't you speak more plainly if your desire is to convey the simple elegance of nature and of the people that were more in tune with it rather than act upset about the very thing you yourself are perpetrating?
Yes, I know that the author was aware of his own inundation in the very world he argued against. I just wanted there to be more balance and honesty rather than what felt like self-annihilating, cover up, romanticized rambling around what was essentially a series of camping trips and hikes. The title itself was laced with this pretension and the introduction or whatever it is clearly states this incredibly difficult and interesting objective in a well-written and concise way. It's a great sales pitch that just didn't quite come through for me.
Like I said, I'm at least partially with you here though, Charles. Dogma doesn't belong in science or history and much of what you say is quite appealing. I really enjoyed that cringey portion about the dinner with the professor. Very courageous. However, there are many points that I must disagree with at this moment, especially with regard to your conception of some pure beginning, of some imagined moment in human history of complete harmony with nature and purity of spirit. This idea itself in the child of the Christian narrative of the fall of man. So re-vamping this story as man's fall from nature is non-unique and extremely contestable.
Here's my distilled take away:
This book has decent snippets that are good to think about. It's a novel way to conceptualize human history and consciousness through experiential and philosophical lens. It is also a book that is mostly about going camping. Clear in objective and then vague throughout the execution.
This book is something to read and discuss, approached with a grain of salt. I would give it two and half stars if I could because it belongs right at the intersection of good and bad.
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Sep 10, 2021Paul rated it it was amazing
Absolutely stunning. Read this book. Quit your job. Go outside.
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Sep 01, 2021Annie rated it it was amazing
Shelves: netgalley
Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.
Being a Human is a meandering nearly stream-of-consciousness look at human development over the last forty thousand (or so) years and examining three ages of human-ness along the way. Released 31st Aug 2021 by Macmillan on their Metropolitan imprint, it's 400 pages and is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately; it makes it so easy to find information with the search function.
This is an eccentric book; beautifully written and oddly moving in a lot of places. The prose is a lot more prose-like than most nonfiction books I've encountered and I enjoyed the cadence of the author's voice very much. I can imagine that he would be outside the usual standard-operating-fare as a lecturer, and I envy his students. He manages to traverse the metaphorical Strait of Messina without straying into "aw, shucks" self deprecation or pedagogical pomposity, no mean feat.
The book covers a massive amount of time (obviously) and is arranged more or less chronologically: Upper Paleolithic (in four parts), Neolithic (ditto), and the current age looking toward the future. I found myself continually distracted during the reading by the enlightening and copious annotations and notes. After the first bit, I decided to ignore the notes and links and just read the information, making notes of the bits I really wanted to delve into more deeply later. That seemed to really help with continuity and flow and reading enjoyment.
As stated, the book is copiously annotated and the chapter notes provide a wealth of further reading for readers wishing to deep dive in the material. The bibliography is massive (though, as the author says, impossibly abbreviated since a real bibliography would include everything ever written by or about human beings).
I enjoyed this read immensely. I would heartily recommend it for lovers of science philosophy, anthropology, but maybe not so much for readers looking for "just the facts, Ma'am". This has been one of my better nonfiction reads for 2021.
Five stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes. (less)
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Aug 21, 2021B. rated it liked it
I won an ARC of this one in a Goodreads Giveaway. There are a lot of stream of consciousness ramblings on the part of the author, which isn't something that I typically associate with non-fiction. I was hoping for a more academic take on the exploration of consciousness when I entered the giveaway for this one, and I have to admit that the lack of a scholarly tone to the book was a real bummer. There's still some fascinating information in here, but it's not the book for me. It comes off as though it's being written in a blog-like format, and that's not something I have an interest in keeping on my shelves. (less)
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May 25, 2021James Orton rated it it was amazing
This is an incredibly special book. Beautifully descriptive nature writing exploring the origins of consciousness via three periods in our evolution. Part memoir, philosophy and anthropology, this is ideal for anybody that enjoyed ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and ‘The Songlines’. A wonderful piece of writing that will leave you exhilarated and excited for the where the next 40,000 years will take us.
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Jun 10, 2022Toby Newton rated it it was amazing
Really a wonderful book. This was what I imagined Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance would be but so absolutely wasn't - a truly impassioned, sometimes blisteringly insightful, always interesting, occasionally angry, often poetic, orgy of beingness. Where Zen is plodding and shrill and alienating, Being a Human is lithe and teasing and resonant.
Knowledgeable, courageous, ludic (if not lunatic), compelling, and with a beautiful turn of phrase. I put this amongst the ranks of my fifty Top Ten books.
Thank you, very much, Mr Foster. (less)
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Mar 28, 2022Amy rated it it was amazing
Foster's radically experiential and immersive methods of investigation into the minds of paleolithic and neolithic humans become the foundation of an argument for ecstatic mysticism.
If we go into the woods ad the rivers and the hills and the sees with all this, the wild will feel appreciated. It will know we're trying, and will start to come out and introduce itself. And since you are part of the wild, you should brace yourself for an encounter with yourself." p. 328 (less)
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Sep 24, 2021Mayda (My Book Cafe Life) rated it really liked it
“We are people who needs stories, as we need air…”
Being Human by Charles Foster was an interesting read. The book is philosophical and poetic. It discusses mankind’s relationship with mother nature as we journey through history without specific dates. Exploring the consciousness via three periods of our evolution, Paleolithic, Neolithic and Enlightenment. It also includes subjects about the origins of religion and language.
Full Review over at https://mybookcafelife.com
**I received this book in exchange for an honest review** (less)
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