How to Be Animal

Blending personal experience with scientific observation, Challenger has a talent for making the known seem unexpected or unsettling

Auteur

Melanie Challenger works as a researcher on the history of humanity and the natural world, and environmental philosophy. She is the author of On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature. She received a Darwin Now Award for her research in the Canadian Arctic, and the Arts Council International Fellowship with the British Antarctic Survey for her work on the history of whaling.

melaniechallenger.com

Texte du rabat

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 offers a radical take on what it means to be human and argues that at the heart of our psychology is a profound struggle with being animal. Tracing the history of this thinking through to its far-reaching effects on our lives, and drawing on a range of disciplines, Challenger proposes that being an animal is a process, beautiful and unpredictable, and that we have a chance to tell ourselves a new story; to realise that if we matter, so does everything else.

Résumé
Combining popular science, history and moral philosophy, this is a wide-ranging and radical take on the human story and what it means for us today