Being a Human

'Dazzling and, yes, eccentric ... Foster is a beautiful writer and an engaging companion throughout this ... wonderfully fun if entirely bonkers read' - Alex Preston 'Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness is not the book its subtitle would have us believe. It's a better one. It's 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 ... Foster is a writer of extraordinary ability' - Rebecca Coffey 'Foster's daringly imaginative exploration of alternative models of selfhood is an original and beneficial way of grappling with history ... There is an increasing awareness today of the limitations of individualist models of selfhood, which many consider the root cause of some of our most urgent crises. The kinds of new and old imaginaries that Foster explores here, empirically and otherwise, are precisely what we need to remind us that there are many alternatives to the I, me, mine mindset' - Anna Katharina Schaffner 'Foster is an amiable narrator. He is self-deprecating, feminist, in awe of what the natural world has to teach him. His observations - that it is hard to say where humans stop and aurochs begin; that the great disaster of the Enlightenment was its reduction of the universe to a machine - align firmly with those of Donna Haraway and Amitav Ghosh in recalling us to the epic mysticism of existence. He is, I think, also an optimist, still hopeful for humanity, even if we are never again going to run around Derbyshire in a deerskin loincloth' - Rachel Andrews 'Controversial, yet oddly compelling' - Nature