David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (for which he received the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction), discusses and signs his new book Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Pantheon, $26.95)

Abram's first book, The Spell of the Sensuous-hailed as "revolutionary" by the Los Angeles Times, as "daring and truly original" by Science-has become a classic of environmental literature. Now Abram returns with a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature.
 
As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we've inured ourselves to the wild intelligence of our muscled flesh, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. This book subverts that distance, drawing readers ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the body and the breathing Earth.
 
The shape shifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in Abram's investigation. He shows that from the awakened perspective of the human animal, awareness (or mind) is not an exclusive possession of our species but a lucid quality of the biosphere itself-a quality in which we, along with the oaks and the spiders, steadily participate.
 
With the audacity of its vision and the luminosity of its prose, Becoming Animal sets a new benchmark for the human appraisal of our place in the whole.

Abram is the founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics, and his writing is informed by his work with indigenous peoples, as well as by the American nature-writing tradition that stems from Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman.  He is profiled in the 2007 bookVisionaries: The 20th Century's 100 Most Inspirational Leaders and lives in northern New Mexico.