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How Animals Shape the Human Mind
by Michael Bond
A mind-expanding deep dive into how animals have shaped us, from the palaeolithic era to the present day.
In Animate, acclaimed science writer Michael Bond explores how animals have profoundly influenced our minds and cultures. Drawing on cutting-edge insights from psychology, anthropology, literature and neuroscience, Bond traces the varied ways their lives have affected ours, from our hunter-gatherer ancestors whose brains were rewired by the prey they hunted and the predators they feared, to the medieval and Enlightenment thinkers who used animals to promote notions of human supremacy.
Scientists today are challenging the assumption that we are separate from and superior to animals, showing that they too possess intelligence, empathy, creativity and even the ability to use tools. If everything that supposedly makes us human is shared with other creatures, where does that leave us? And if we are not as exceptional as we thought, how should we be treating the animals we live alongside?
A fascinating exploration of what it means to be both human and animal, Animate shows that to better understand ourselves, we must pay more attention to the other beings with whom we share our world.
"In this beautiful biography of humans' evolution with animals Michael Bond explores how we can resolve our recent messy divorce from nature and 'reanimate' ourselves, returning to a place where we can learn, judge and find ourselves through the way we relate to the animal world. Full of wonders and insights, awash with compassion and self-reflection, Animate is an astonishing adventure into our own psychology expressed through our relationship with animals." ―Isabella Tree, author of Wilding
"It's hard to know where we end and our dog begins. The same is true, if we could only see it, for humans and non-humans generally. By letting us eavesdrop on the conversation between us and the wild, Bond, in this thrilling, effortlessly readable book, helps us to see—and so to know our own shape and nature. Essential, transformative stuff." ―Charles Foster, author of The Edges of the World
This information about Animate was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michael Bond, the author of the acclaimed Wayfinding: The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose Our Way, is a writer specializing in human behaviour and a former editor and reporter at New Scientist. He won the 2015 British Psychological Society Prize for The Power of Others and is currently teaching writing as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University.
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