Thank you for the opportunity to read this ARC!
Peter Godfrey-Smith has been one of my favorite writers all time. From his books such as Metazoa, but also his scientific publications (which I have notifications for on Google Scholar), PGS has an amazing away of telling an incredibly complex story in terms that are understandable for many people. As the third book of the series, I think this did an amazing job on re-framing ancient history to center around organisms that are often overlooked. The discussion of consciousness as a functional output of biological needs was poetic, and the conclusion surrounding what this history means for our treatment of animals and ecosystems was an amazing conclusion.
I'm always excited to see a PGS book being released, so thank you to the publishers for the opportunity to read this ARC!

A good read, although at times my attention wandered a bit as some sections were more interesting than others.

I have read other books by the author and liked them enough so I have decided to read this book also. This book is like a collection of interconected essays about aspects of life in the world to specific questionings about humans, going from how life came to be on Earth, the feeling of self in animals (not just humans), language and more recent discussions, like the welfare of cattle animals, the changing of nature by humans and so on. It's really diversified, but for me some chapters were more interesting and easy to understand than others, but I admit the the majority of the topics discussed here were things that I have already read about before in some way (some more than others). In the end I consider it a cool book and was interesting to see the discussions brought by the author.

Thank you Netgalley and Farrar, Strous and Giroux for the eARC of this book. All the opinions here are my own and given freely.