Written by: Charles Foster
First line: I first ate a live mammal on a Scottish hill.
Why you should read this book: A legal scholar and veterinary surgeon who teaches at Oxford and has a home and a family and all sorts of modern-day comforts intentionally shucks them all off in pursuit of an upper paleolithic consciousness, which he attempts to achieve by living in such a way as to summon the mindset of the earliest "behaviorally modern" humans. While many readers will find his methods insane, and his conclusions questionable (Foster uses the modern nonfiction literary technique of imagining in great detail things that he can't possibly know at all and then presenting his daydreams as fact, and sometimes of telling you later on that he made up part of the story because it would have been interesting if it had happened that way), this book does have the power to draw you in to its provocative thesis about our species' place in the order of the universe and our orientation to the natural world and all the things that are wrong with the civilization we've created in the last fifteen thousand years. It's not at all the book I thought it was going to be, but it's a pretty gripping book about a guy who feels out of sync with the world trying to synchronize himself with the planet and waking up certain parts of his mind while inadvertently removing himself even further from the world he started from.
Why you shouldn't read this book: You would consider a man voluntarily starving himself into hallucinations for eight days while lying outside in the snow and watching his young adolescent son eat road kill even though his friend's house is just a short walk away some form of child abuse.
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