Melanie Challenger

How To Be Animal: A new history of what it means to be human

(Forthcoming in 2020)
Humans are the most inquisitive, emotional, imaginative, aggressive and baffling animals on the planet, but how well do we really know ourselves? How to Be Animal will rewrite the remarkable human story and argue that at the heart of our psychology is a profound struggle with being animal. As well as piecing together the mystery of how this psychology evolved, the book examines the wide-reaching ways in which it affects our lives, from our politics to the ways we distance ourselves from other species. A blend of natural and environmental history, and philosophy, How To Be Animal will take in our ancient past and bring us into a near future of artificial intelligence and bioengineered life. It is a book for anyone who’s ever puzzled about the meaning of human existence and the wide variety of views on what life is and how it matters.

“

Books are thick letters to friends.

”

Peter Sloterdijk

Melanie Challenger is a writer and researcher across natural and environmental history, and philosophy. In 2007, she travelled to Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey as research for her first non-fiction book, On Extinction, which was picked by Publishers Weekly as one of the best non-fiction books of 2012. She received a British Council Darwin Now Award and completed her research in the Canadian Arctic.

Reviews for On Extinction

“Challenger combines her meditations on our fragmenting world into a finely integrated study of loss.”

— Nature

“On Extinction is a thoughtful, unique personal reflection and rumination on a foreboding topic and what it means for us as a global people. Readers will…reach the final pages feeling as if they’ve just returned from a most fascinating — and enlightening — odyssey.”

— Washington Independent Review of Books

“A deep look at the human capacity for extinction twined with roamings to the far ends of the earth, from poet and fledgling natural historian Challenger…She has a rangy curiosity that extends well past ignorance and alienation as the sole agents of the man-made extinction…A formidable inquiry into why the marvels of nature and the distinctiveness of cultures are constantly imperiled.”

— Kirkus

Thinking with the planet

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Humans

EXCERPT Lorem ipsum, or lipsum as it is sometimes known, is dummy text used in laying out print, graphic or web designs. The passage is attributed to an unknown typesetter in the 15th century who is thought to have scrambled parts of Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum for use in a type specimen book.