How to Be Animal Paperback by Melanie Challenger

Product Details

• Publisher: Allen Lane (2021-03-23)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 272 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780735238121
• Item Weight: 238.14 grams
• Dimensions: 8.24 x 5.45 x 0.66 cm

What makes us human, and why are we so sure we're different from other animals?

Humans are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive, and baffling animals on the planet. But how well do we really know ourselves? How to Be Animal rewrites the remarkable human story and argues that at the heart of our psychology is a profound struggle with being animal.

Most of our effects on the planet are the consequences of technological improvements and advances in our understanding of natural mechanisms. But why did this cognitive and technological edge come about in the first place and what kind of being has it made us? In How to Be Animal, Challenger brilliantly argues that this dizzying trajectory is the result of a singular characteristic of our species: the struggle with being an animal.

Using a combination of memoir, historical texts, interweaving interviews and cultural and environmental history, How to Be Animal is lively and thought-provoking, bursting with ideas. This is a book for anyone who has ever contemplated what humans are and what makes our species so simultaneously brilliant and awful. Even more so, it is a book that asks tantalizing philosophical questions, such as whether and how human life matters.

How to Be Animal is a tough-minded but ultimately sympathetic portrait of humanity. It exposes human beings as extraordinary animals defined by a profound struggle. In the third millennium, the way humans respond to being an animal among animals is the greatest and most inspiring challenge we face.

About the Author

MELANIE CHALLENGER works as a researcher on the history of humanity and the natural world, and environmental philosophy. Her first book, On Extinction: How We Became Estranged From Nature, was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best non-fiction books of 2012. She received a Darwin Now Award for her research among Canadian Inuit and the Arts Council International Fellowship with British Antarctic Survey for her work on the history of whaling. She is also an award winning poet.