I was quite excited to read “Being a Beast.” The description of a man living as a wild animal – not merely living “like” a wild animal, but living “as” one – was unique and radical. I was curious to read how Charles Foster would reveal the animal world in a way that wasn’t anthropomorphized or human-centric. In the beginning, Foster even wrote that he knew it would be a challenge to write about the lives and experiences of animals because he could only use his human senses to describe them. Though Foster tried mightily to eliminate his humanness from his descriptions of badger lives, otter lives, deer lives, and others, it never quite worked for me. There was always a lyricism to Foster’s writing as if he was trying to enchant the reader and cloak them in a veil of mystery. He wrote as if he had all the answers but was only able to open the curtain an inch for the reader to peek in. To me, this approach felt overtly narcissistic. Sure, Foster lived in a hole with his son eating worms pretending to be a badger, but he never revealed anything particularly earth-shattering about badger lives that I didn’t already know from common sense. Maybe this book would be interesting to someone who’s never set foot within 500 feet of a natural area, but I found it to be boring and unable to escape the whimsical tone of old fairy tales. Foster was trying too hard to be objective and scientific without knowing how. I haven’t even mentioned the meandering, extravagant (not in a good way), condescending writing style. Wow, too bad – this book could have been good if an actual naturalist wrote it.

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Created Aug 25, 2019 at 2:04pm • Submit your own review...