In this provocative, wide-ranging book, Against the Grain, Richard Manning offers a dramatically revisionist view of recent human evolution, beginning with the vast increase in brain size that set us apart from our primate relatives and brought an accompanying increase in our need for nourishment. For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive, and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of our past 10,000 years. The evolutionary road is littered with failed experiments, however, and Manning suggests that agriculture as we have practiced it runs against both our grain and nature's. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation, erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in the devil's bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and the planet's.

リチャード・マニングが本作で描くのは、人類が一万年前に交わした「悪魔の契約」への痛烈な告発です。農耕という安定の代償に、私たちは本来の野性や知性、そして地球との調和を失ったのではないか。文明の進歩という神話を鮮やかに解体するマニングの筆致は、読者の魂に眠る「狩猟採集民」としての本能を激しく揺さぶります。 本作の真髄は、現代人が抱える空虚感の根源を暴き出す圧倒的な洞察力にあります。自然の理に抗う生き方を問い直し、自らの内なる野生を再発見せよと迫る情熱的な思索は、私たちの血肉に刻まれた進化の記憶を呼び覚ますでしょう。生きる意味を根底から問い直すこの一冊は、閉塞した現代を切り拓くための真の「知恵」を授けてくれます。