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jerushalynnx's review against another edition
2.0
Dnf. This guy has some gumption.
This is a book about his attempts to live like various creatures. For example, he burrows into a dirt hole and hangs out for a few hours and then his friend drives up and brings him sandwiches and coffee. Idk. It’s just weird but not in a compelling way. In the introduction he apologizes for writing the book..like he started it and realized it was BS but had nothing else going on and decided to finish and publish it. I’m not even sure if he is a scientist.
This is a book about his attempts to live like various creatures. For example, he burrows into a dirt hole and hangs out for a few hours and then his friend drives up and brings him sandwiches and coffee. Idk. It’s just weird but not in a compelling way. In the introduction he apologizes for writing the book..like he started it and realized it was BS but had nothing else going on and decided to finish and publish it. I’m not even sure if he is a scientist.
bfg's review against another edition
As much as I wanted to, I just couldn’t get into this one. The pace was too slow and I found myself drifting off in thought about anything other than what I was reading.
balancedmultitudes's review against another edition
I do not need to listen to a self-obsessed guy rambling on about his so-called, self-proclaimed expertise. This book is the reading equivalent to that experience. No thank you
andrewspink's review against another edition
adventurous
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
Charles Foster is clearly a complete nutter, which made for an interesting book. In order to determine what it is like to be various animals, he lives in a hole in the ground and eats earthworms for some months to see what it is like to be a badger and or vomiting his food up so that he would know what it was like to be an animal that chews the cud, like a deer.
Quite early on, he concludes that he cannot really feel what it is like to have the auditory world of a badger, 'not because of physiology but of otherness'. Despite that, he goes on to project a whole lot of his own emotions and feelings into what it must be like to be a badger or deer. It is only really in the final chapter, about swifts, where he concludes that swifts are so other that he cannot get inside their heads. My problem with this book is not that he says that animals have emotions. He says that professional biologists disapproved of that statement. That might have been the case a few decades ago, but by the time this book was published in 2016, very few behavioural biologists would oppose the term. My problem is that he does not sufficiently allow the animals to have their own emotions and tries to make everything fit into his own range of experience, an endeavour necessarily fated to fail. He describes how he goes through various contortions trying to understand what the sensory world of an animal that has whiskers might be like, but in the end seeing we don't have that sense, it is literally beyond our imagination. It is really not like feeling with our hands, that we do know (and I should mention that I am a co-author on a paper recently published about whiskers!).
He states at one point that otters don't experience pain. That is a very bizarre and ungrounded statement. All animals (possibly excluding insects), but certainly mammals, reptiles, fish and birds, feel pain.
He says that foxes can leap 3m, which is equivalent to him jumping 8m. This is an unfortunately common mistake made by nature programmes on the TV and by popular sciences books. This comparison misapplies scaling laws. The ability to jump does not scale linearly with size because the physics of jumping involves factors like muscle strength, body mass, and energy expenditure, which do not scale in a simple linear fashion.
He also doesn't understand red-green colour blindness. Like 8% of human males, I am red-green colour-blind. That does not mean that I see everything in grey scale, far from it. It means something like that sometimes red is rather like a shade of green.
Finally, he gives space to the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake. His ideas were discredited decades ago, I don't think anyone who has actually looked into the so-called evidence for them takes them seriously these days.
Nevertheless, having said all that, those are minor quibbles and this was a though-provoking book which I enjoyed reading.
Quite early on, he concludes that he cannot really feel what it is like to have the auditory world of a badger, 'not because of physiology but of otherness'. Despite that, he goes on to project a whole lot of his own emotions and feelings into what it must be like to be a badger or deer. It is only really in the final chapter, about swifts, where he concludes that swifts are so other that he cannot get inside their heads. My problem with this book is not that he says that animals have emotions. He says that professional biologists disapproved of that statement. That might have been the case a few decades ago, but by the time this book was published in 2016, very few behavioural biologists would oppose the term. My problem is that he does not sufficiently allow the animals to have their own emotions and tries to make everything fit into his own range of experience, an endeavour necessarily fated to fail. He describes how he goes through various contortions trying to understand what the sensory world of an animal that has whiskers might be like, but in the end seeing we don't have that sense, it is literally beyond our imagination. It is really not like feeling with our hands, that we do know (and I should mention that I am a co-author on a paper recently published about whiskers!).
He states at one point that otters don't experience pain. That is a very bizarre and ungrounded statement. All animals (possibly excluding insects), but certainly mammals, reptiles, fish and birds, feel pain.
He says that foxes can leap 3m, which is equivalent to him jumping 8m. This is an unfortunately common mistake made by nature programmes on the TV and by popular sciences books. This comparison misapplies scaling laws. The ability to jump does not scale linearly with size because the physics of jumping involves factors like muscle strength, body mass, and energy expenditure, which do not scale in a simple linear fashion.
He also doesn't understand red-green colour blindness. Like 8% of human males, I am red-green colour-blind. That does not mean that I see everything in grey scale, far from it. It means something like that sometimes red is rather like a shade of green.
Finally, he gives space to the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake. His ideas were discredited decades ago, I don't think anyone who has actually looked into the so-called evidence for them takes them seriously these days.
Nevertheless, having said all that, those are minor quibbles and this was a though-provoking book which I enjoyed reading.
birdwatching's review against another edition
4.0
Charles Foster is completely bonkers but it makes this book highly entertaining
ovenbird_reads's review against another edition
4.0
this was such a great book to start my year. funny and profound, the author does serious philosophical work while never taking himself too seriously. highly recommend. especially if you need a little break from the human world right now.
ursineultra's review against another edition
1.0
Tiring, frequently aimless, self-obsessed and very little actually to do with crossing the 'species divide'. Foster is a beast until it's inconvenient and then he isn't, but it doesnt matter because that's actually the point. Or something. I feel sorry for his kids who are allegedly roped into bits of this. He left a toddler in a nettle bush to climb a tree and look at some birds. Oh, and in case you hadn't guessed Foster let's us know he can climb a tree 'really quite high'. What a tool.
Also, he used to kill things and seems to secretly really miss it.
Legitimately one of the worst books I have ever read.
Also, he used to kill things and seems to secretly really miss it.
Legitimately one of the worst books I have ever read.
beastreader's review against another edition
2.0
I was very intrigued to check out this book when I read the concept of it. I mean this is dedication when an author goes all out to really submerse himself into the subject matters that he is writing about. I don't doubt for one bit that Mr. Foster really did eat a warm or drinking double espressos every couple of hours to attempt to experience what it is like to be an otter. As Mr. Foster states being a otter is like being on speed.
I contemplated giving up on this book after reading just about being an animal and then reading a long discussion about badgers, I was about done with this book. Yet on the other hand I was intrigued by the wealth of knowledge about the different animals and their relationship to humans. What made this book cumbersome to read for me was that it read a lot like a scientific medical journal. Useful information but it can also be tedious to read. So for the rest of the book I kind of skimmed bits of information here and there, which for me it made the book easier to read. Although at times I still did need to take breaks. I have learned a lot more about badgers, otters, foxes, deer, and swift then I ever did before.
I contemplated giving up on this book after reading just about being an animal and then reading a long discussion about badgers, I was about done with this book. Yet on the other hand I was intrigued by the wealth of knowledge about the different animals and their relationship to humans. What made this book cumbersome to read for me was that it read a lot like a scientific medical journal. Useful information but it can also be tedious to read. So for the rest of the book I kind of skimmed bits of information here and there, which for me it made the book easier to read. Although at times I still did need to take breaks. I have learned a lot more about badgers, otters, foxes, deer, and swift then I ever did before.
chelseadollphin's review against another edition
1.0
So here's the story. I was supposed to read this book for an English class last semester, but we never got around to it. My English professor encouraged us to read it over the summer, and, since he was such a great professor and the book looked interesting, I decided to give it a go. That, my friends, was a big mistake. This book was, frankly, awful. First of all, it was boring. I was expecting a fascinating read about a man exploring nature and whatnot. Instead, I got a man talking about himself, his strange antics, and trivia about animals. Moreover, I couldn't stand Foster. I tried to like him and his writing style, and sometimes it was okay, but overall, Foster came across to me as an arrogant know-it-all. Finally, some of things that Foster did and said in this book were pretty messed up and sometimes downright wrong. For a man who was supposed to be empathetic towards nature, Foster admitted to hunting, owning stuffed animals (taxidermy), hitting a dog with his car when he was with his friend Nigel, and putting a badger skull outside of his homemade sett. Plus, Foster had his kids poop in the woods and left his 3-year-old alone so that he could climb a tree to see some swifts. Last but not least, the thing that really drove me over the edge is the fact that Foster said that he hates cats. Who cares? How is that relevant to the book? I love cats, Foster! Why must you infuriate me like this? Anyways, this review is long enough, so I will end it now by simply telling y'all to not read this book. It's not worth your time.