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. ( )

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. ( )

This was more philosophical than physical, although I guess a lot of physical occurred too, it was just blurry on the time spans of the physical. It was also a case of me reading and wondering how the author didn't get seriously ill after subjecting himself to the cold and the filth (the man-made filth...I'm not too concerned about actual dirt) and some other questionable decisions. Unfortunately, something about his tone of writing didn't speak to me. I guess I was hoping more for either totally unhinged or a Bill Bryson, but it was something else that didn't do it for me. ( )

I came to this book through my study with David Abram on the animacy of the world. David read an excerpt from the begging of the chapter on badgers, and I was hooked.

It is very human thing to pretend to be other animals. Kids do it all the time. As Foster points out, there are things we can learn about both the other and ourselves through this sort of play.

Foster takes his play seriously. In this book, you'll hear recounted stories of eating earthworms while living in a hole in a hillside with his eight-year-old son, having his children poop on the side of rivers as a form of territorial marking, and eating three-week-old pizza in back yards in London.

I remember an especially theatrical and eccentric friend from high school who would do things just for the sensational stories they would supply him with for later. This book has a bit of that quality to it. I wonder; would Foster have been able to do many of the things in this book if it weren't for the sake of getting a book published?

I learned a lot of interesting tidbits. Badgers diets are mostly earthworms. Otters require twenty percent of their body weight in food each day. Birds can distinguish between sounds that are one hundred times closer apart than humans. Swifts spend most of their lives continuously airborne (eating and sleeping while flying).

All of this leads us to the question that Foster never quiet answers: what is it to be human? ( )

Have you ever wondered just what it would be like to be an eagle soaring on thermals or a stag surveying your territory? Some of us may have whilst walking in the countryside or over a contemplative drink, but Charles Foster wanted to know what it was like. Really, really wanted to know… So he chose five different animals; swift, deer, fox, otter and badger, and would try to live their lives as best he could.

He spent six weeks with his son living as a badger inside a hill in Wales in a sett that a friend of his with a JCB had excavated. His friend would leave meals for them to scavenge; but they went for it, eating earthworms and other things that the forest provided, trying to move around on all fours to get a badger’s eye view of the woods they were in. Trying to mimic what an otter does, meant that he spent quite a while splashing around in rivers failing to catch fish, and leaving his own spraints along the banks. Living as an urban fox was easier, sleeping rough in back gardens and scavenging for food in bins, but it did nearly get him arrested! He spends time deep in woods being a deer, imagining what it would be like to be tracked by hounds. Becoming a swift was possibly the hardest, as flying unaided has evaded humans., but he did have a go with a parachute to get a feel of the wind in his hair, and the flies in his teeth.

The human view of the world has some parallels to these creatures; we share the same senses; sight, smell, taste and sound, but their adaption has made them specialists in very particular ways, enhancing their senses so that they survive and thrive. This book is very different to the usual ones that you will read on wildlife. By making the effort to see things from the animal point of view, he has given us a very, very different perspective on the natural world. That and he is a little bit mad… But it works; drawing on neuroscience and psychology his efforts to emulate the lives of the five animals, give him an insight to their daily struggle for survival. There are some amusing moments, and there were parts that I found revolting; but it was refreshing to read something with a very different perspective to the usual natural history books. 3.5 stars overall. ( )