Charles Foster (1) (1962–)

Extraordinary. The synopsis made me think that Foster's experiments - to live like the animals he'd chosen to study - were pointless. Eating eathworms disgusts us. They're bread and butter to badgers. In fact Foster learns huge amounts from spending weeks - say - living at almost ground level in a hole in the earth, learning to trust his senses - of smell, of touch and so on. He adopts the diurnal rhythms of the creatures he's shadowing, and eats their foods. He understands what it may feel like to be a hunted stage by being hunted himself. And so on. Foster writes with passion, humour, and more than a touch of the utterly eccentric. His physical curiosity is sensuous and obsessive. He brought me into contact with the natural world in a tactile, visceral way and it's a book I shan't forget.… (más)

Foster has gone off the deep end, in the best way, with this one. The project of this book is to understand the experience of the Upper Paleolithic people and Neolithic people by modifying his way of life to mimic their lifestyle. The heart and soul of the book is the Upper Paleolithic section, which takes up a majority of the pages, proportional to the amount of human history that we spent wandering and watching and learning as that type of people. His Neolithic section is about compromise, about change, about the costs and benefits of a more stationary lifestyle, and his Enlightenment section is an attempt to reconcile all that with the rapid changes we’ve seen most recently.

He presents authoritative information on what people in those eras experienced, and writes about his own attempts in present tense. The redemption of this personal part of the story is the way he writes about the pubs and the buses. At first this seems counter intuitive. I almost wanted him to find a truly deserted place and pretend. But mentioning these details—the taxi trip back to his house, thinking about his family and his friends not so many miles away—allows him to move past them, and truly immerse himself in his project.

Full review here… (más)

Foster tries to understand several of the woodland animals around him, including the badger, the urban fox, the red deer, and the swift. He attacks from every experiential, academic, and cultural angle, presenting his own experiences sleeping under sheds and tracking migration paths across oceans, as well as extensive calculations and literary context. He writes in a conversational tone that does not assume ignorance of the reader, but invites further exploration of the intense locality of the natural world. It is an illumination in an almost literal sense, a light thrown on the experiences of animals which can so often or so rarely intersect our own. Though he does write about himself, he does not overwhelm his content with his own thoughts and feelings as so many American nonfiction writers do, but rather uses his own thoughts as leverage to explore other avenues and start other topics. The methods, rhythms, and directions of his prose perfectly fit his content.… (más)