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Being a Human

Adventures in 40,000 Years of Consciousness

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About this listen

A New Statesman Essential Non-Fiction Book of 2021.

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 nonhuman 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.

©2021 Charles Foster (P)2021 Hachette Audio UK Anthropology Hunting
All stars
Most relevant
Positively inspired . Could start this from the beginning as soon as I finished. Would highly recommend

A book to listen to again and again,

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thought provoking piece, think of it what you will but it will make you think anyway! And absolutely top noch narrator. immerses you into the world completely

Fantastic writing and narration

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This is not a scientific book, it's not even pop science. It's not philosophical either. The author mixes scientific facts (some very old invalidated since) with his fantasy. It's obviously on purpose, but it's confusing and misleading.

Not for everyone

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