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Digital Audiobook
Being a Human by Charles Foster

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Being a Human

Narrator
Damian Lynch
Publisher
Little, Brown Book Group
Publish Date
26 August 2021
Run Time
10 hours 59 minutes
Format
Audiobook

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What to expect

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.

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Details

Author
Charles Foster
Narrator
Damian Lynch
Duration
10 hours 59 minutes
Release Date
26 August 2021
ISBN
9781782839330
Format
Audiobook
Publisher
Little, Brown Book Group
Genre
Philosophy

Synopsis

A New Statesman Essential Non-Fiction Book of 2021What 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 machineand we were soulless cogs within it.

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