Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
Richard Louv ReviewsBecoming AnimalRichard Louv is the author of seven books, includingLast Child in the Woods. He is the chairman of the Children & Nature Network, and has served as adviser to the Ford Foundation's Leadership for a Changing World award program and the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. Read his review ofBecoming Animal:David Abram is unique among interpreters of the wild voice within us. His first book,The Spell of the Sensuous, has become a touchstone for a needed shift in our thinking about the place of humans in the world. As the poet Gary Snyder remarked, that book helped map us back into the world. In his new book,Becoming Animal, Abram offers a startling new exploration of our entanglement with the rest of nature.  This time, his focus is the intimate but sadly forgotten relationship between our bodies and the earth. By excavating the most ordinary and familiar of our experiences--the perception of shadow, the recognition of depth, the transience of mood--he re-opens for us the knowing that our bodies are intertwined with the flesh of the earth. I cannot imagine another book that so gently and so persuasively alters how we look at ourselves, and reminds us that sentience was never our private possession, that our very awareness is a means  of participating in a more than human world. At no other time in Western history have we needed to listen to the wild voice within us, and to Dave Abram's, as much as we do today.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.