Being a Beast, Charles Foster
Being a Beast, Charles Foster
1 Rating(s)
List: $17.50 | Sale: $12.25
Club: $8.75

Being a Beast
Adventures Across the Species Divide

Author: Charles Foster

Narrator: Charles Foster

Unabridged: 7 hr 27 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/21/2016


Synopsis

A passionate naturalist explores what it’s really like to be an animal―by living like them

How can we ever be sure that we really know the other? To test the limits of our ability to inhabit lives that are not our own, Charles Foster set out to know the ultimate other: the non-humans, the beasts. And to do that, he tried to be like them, choosing a badger, an otter, a fox, a deer, and a swift. He lived alongside badgers for weeks, sleeping in a sett in a Welsh hillside and eating earthworms, learning to sense the landscape through his nose rather than his eyes. He caught fish in his teeth while swimming like an otter; rooted through London garbage cans as an urban fox; was hunted by bloodhounds as a red deer, nearly dying in the snow. And he followed the swifts on their migration route over the Strait of Gibraltar, discovering himself to be strangely connected to the birds.

A lyrical, intimate, and completely radical look at the life of animals―human and other―Being a Beast mingles neuroscience and psychology, nature writing and memoir to cross the boundaries separating the species. It is an extraordinary journey full of thrills and surprises, humor and joy. And, ultimately, it is an inquiry into the human experience in our world, carried out by exploring the full range of the life around us.

About Charles Foster

Charles Foster is the author of Being a Beast, which won the 2016 Ig Nobel Award for biology and was a finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize. He teaches medical law and ethics at the University of Oxford and his writing has been published in National Geographic, the Guardian, Nautilus, Slate, the Journal of Medical Ethics and many other venues. He lives in Oxford, England.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Peter on April 17, 2017

"I want to know what it is like to be a wild thing." This book is bonkers. Charles Foster, a veterinarian and barrister among other occupations, explains his frustration with traditional nature writing, saying that it has "generally been about humans striding colonially around, describing what they s......more

Goodreads review by Ben on May 31, 2016

This book – and I hesitate to box it in with so insipid-sounding a genre as nature writing is crazy beautiful. A stunning, vertiginous, odd, outrageous, academically rich, and personally challenging work. Charles Foster – a vet and academic –takes us on a mind-altering, shamanistic, trip into the wil......more

Goodreads review by Kerri Anne on August 18, 2016

This is undoubtedly one of the strangest literary journeys on which I've ever embarked, and after finishing this book, I'm left feeling both strangely inspired* and noticeably annoyed. There are parts of this book I wholly disagree with, based on my own knowledge of the wild animals in question, and......more

Goodreads review by Georgia on January 14, 2021

quite a hard one to rate - how do you begin to judge a man who chose to live as a badger, eating worms and snuffling around in the soil, apart from simply being surprised that someone agreed to sleep with him? the premise of the book is on one hand beautiful but on the other, fatally flawed - the an......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on May 15, 2017

I wouldn't dissuade others from reading this book, but I wouldn't recommend it either. I wasn't sure what I expected from a book detailing a man's efforts to live like animals, but I found this to be a rather underwhelming read. The writing itself was respectable, but I just didn't get sucked into t......more