David Abram - Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

An Orion Book Award Finalist

A truly alchemical book. Those of us who still hope for a revolutionary change in our thinking toward animals, the living land and the climate will welcome this book. Abram is an audacious thinker, a true visionary, and, really, just a damn good nature writer.

San Francisco Book Review

Prose as lush as a moss-draped rain forest and as luminous as a high desert night. Deeply resonant with indigenous ways of knowing, Abram lets us listen in on wordless conversations with ancient boulders, walruses, birds, and roof beams. His profound recognition of intelligences other than our own enables us to enter into reciprocal symbioses that can, in turn, sustain the world. Becoming Animal illuminates a way forward in restoring relationship with the earth, led by our vibrant animal bodies to re-inhabit the glittering world.

Orion Magazine

A stunning, compelling journey into embodied, earthly intelligence, Becoming Animal is philosophy at its engaging best. Prepare for a wild, profound ride into the essence of the human animalan essence embedded in communion with the Earth. A must read for anyone concerned about the future of the planet and ourselves.

Kiern Suckling, co-founder and
Executive Director, Center for Biological Diversity

In Becoming Animal, David Abram has crafted the rarest of literary gems: a sublime effort combining transcendent prose, lucid insight, and lasting consequence.

Shambhala Sun

Refreshing. [Abram] allows himself to be expansive, sentimental, and more than a little mad.

Bookforum

If we are to surviveindeed, if we are to stop the dominant culture from killing the planetit will be in great measure because of brave and brilliant beings like David Abram. This is a beautifully written, deeply moving, and important book.

Derrick Jensen, author of
A Language Older Than Words and Endgame

Provocative, boldly recalibrating. A creative and visionary ecologist and philosopher, Abram offers perception-heightening insights into the disastrous consequences of our increasing detachment from the living world as we funnel our attention to the cyber realms. [He] draws on his adventures as an itinerant sleight-of-hand magician to forge an inspirited physics of being. We cant restore nature, Abram writes, without restorying life, hence his prodigious, transfixing, and rectifying earthly cosmology.

Booklist (starred review)

Becoming Animal brings us home to ourselves as living organs of this wild planet. Its teachings leap off the page and translate immediately into lived experience.

Joanna Macy, Buddhist scholar and activist

Without doubt one of Americas greatest nature writers, one who ably follows in the footsteps of Muir, Thoreau and Leopold. [A] book of such transformative potential that it needs to be read twice in quick succession to get the full benefit. The language is luminous, the style hypnotic. Abram weaves a spell that brings the world alive.

Resurgence magazine

This book is like a prehistoric cave. If you have the nerve to enter it and you get used to the dark, youll discover things about storytelling which are startling, urgent and deeply true. Things each of us once knew, but forgot when we were born into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Extraordinary rediscoveries!

John Berger, author of
Ways of Seeing and Why Look at Animals?

Pure enthusiasm drives Abram to explore the yearning of our body for the larger body of Earth. [Abram] brings the magicians sense of mystery and playful surprise. His celebratory embrace of all that surrounds him is refreshing in the extreme.

Kirkus Reviews

As with many deeply originaland radicalbooks, this work may startle, even provoke the reader in its electric reversal of conventional thought. This is a portrait of the artist as a young raven, arguing, with all the subtlety of his mind, for the mindedness of the body. An exercise of uncanny imagination.

Jay Griffiths, author of Wild

This brave and magical book summons wild wonder to remind us who we are.

Amory B. Lovins, Chief Scientist,
Rocky Mountain Institute

Speculative, learned, and always lucid and precise as the eye of the vulture that confronted him once on a cliff ledge, Abram has one of those rare minds which, like the mind of a musician or a great mathematician, fuses dreaminess with smarts.

The Village Voice

Abrams prose is lighted from within, happy, solid and clear. [Becoming Animal] helps the reader remember his or her place in the larger, luminous world.

Los Angeles Times

This startling, sparkling book challenges the technological temper of our times by returning us to the animal body in ourselves. Abram shows brilliantly how this body brings us back to Earth in a series of acutely moving descriptions of its polysensory genius. An original work of primary philosophy, it is written with verve, passion, and poetry.

Edward S. Casey, author of
The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History

David Abram is an ecologist, anthropologist, and philosopher who lectures and teaches widely around the world. His prior book, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, helped catalyze the emergence of several new disciplines, including the burgeoning field of ecopsychology. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, David was named by both the Utne Reader and the British journal Resurgence as one of a hundred visionaries transforming contemporary culture. His writings on the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disarray are published in numerous magazines, scholarly journals, and anthologies. A co-founder of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), David lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.

The Spell of the Sensuous

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2011

Copyright 2010 by David Abram

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in
hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York, in 2010.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work previously appeared in different form in the following:
Orion; Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place, edited by Gregory Caicco
(Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2007); and The Child,
the Painter, and the Forgotten Life of Things by David Abram (Deer Isle, ME:
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts Monograph Series, 2003).

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Abram, David.
Becoming animal : an earthly cosmology / David Abram.
p. cm.