Books like Humankind by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Richard Dawkins’ classic, The Selfish Gene reexamines evolution from the perspective of genes as primary agents, arguing that organisms serve as vehicles for gene replication.

Hannah Arendt’s classic examination of human activity—labor, work, and action—shows how everyday practice shapes the human condition and serves as a foundation for political freedom.

Francis Fukuyama traces how diverse societies have arrived at their present political arrangements, exploring the historical and comparative routes that shape modern states.

"We are in the midst of a growing ecological crisis. Developing technologies and cultural interventions are throwing the status of "human" into question. It is against this context that Patricia McCormack delivers her expert justification for the "ahuman'. An alternative to "posthuman" thought, the term paves the way for thinking that doesn't dissolve into nihilism and despair, but actively embraces issues like human extinction, vegan abolition, atheist occultism, death studies, a refusal of identity politics, deep ecology, and the apocalypse as an optimistic beginning. In order to suggest vitalistic, perhaps even optimistic, ways to negotiate some of the difficulties in thinking and acting in the world, this book explores five key contemporary themes: · Identity · Spirituality · Art · Death · The apocalypse Collapsing activism, artistic practice and affirmative ethics, while introducing some radical contemporary ideas and addressing specifically modern phenomena like death cults, intersectional identity politics and capitalist enslavement of human and nonhuman organisms to the point of 'zombiedom', The Ahuman Manifesto navigates the ways in which we must compose the human differently, specifically beyond nihilism and post- and trans-humanism and outside human privilege. This is so that we can actively think and live viscerally, with connectivity (actual not virtual), and with passion and grace, toward a new world."--