GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human

The dazzling success of The Toaster Project, including TV appearances and an international book tour, leaves Thomas Thwaites in a slump. His friends increasingly behave like adults, while Thwaites still lives at home, "stuck in a big, dark hole." Luckily, a research grant offers the perfect out: a chance to take a holiday from the complications of being human—by transforming himself into a goat. What ensues is a hilarious and surreal journey through engineering, design, and psychology, as Thwaites interviews neuroscientists, animal behaviorists, prosthetists, goat sanctuary workers, and goatherds.

From this, he builds a goat exoskeleton—artificial legs, helmet, chest protector, raincoat from his mum, and a prosthetic goat stomach to digest grass (with help from a pressure cooker and campfire)—before setting off across the Alps on four legs with a herd of his fellow creatures. Will he make it? Do Thwaites and his readers discover what it truly means to be human?

GoatMan tells all in Thwaites's inimitable style, which NPR extols as "a laugh-out- loud-funny but thoughtful guide through his own adventures."

• The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch
• The World Hunt: An Environmental History of the Commodification of Animals (California World History Library)
• The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science
• Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide
• The Great Transition: Climate, Disease And Society In The Late Medieval World
• Dog Days: An Animal Chronicle (CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature translated from the French)
• Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
• Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization
• Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?