How to Be a Living Thing: Meditations on Intuitive Oysters, Hopeful Doves, and Being Human in the World

In these essays, Mari Andrew’s wants to encourage us to spend more time with animals as a means of exploration. Doing so can bring our similarities to bear, such as the shared impact confinement has on humans and Orcas alike and how most creatures respond to pain or loss. We can discover the unique and inexplicable abilities non-human creatures might possess. Oysters, for example, adjust feeding schedules around moon cycles and can do so in a Midwest basement with no moonlight cues. These and other essays are fascinating. Some less successful ones include Andrews’s comparison of humans who enjoy moving locations to the nomadic nature of snow leopards. While the comparison holds, the human gypsy subset is limited while the pool of roving or nomadic animal species is quite large. Thank you to PENGUIN GROUP Viking Penguin | Penguin Life and NetGalley for providing this eARC