The Immortalization Commission by John Gray - ISBN: 9780141041889
Paperback
Chasing immortality: a secret history of science, death, and delusion.

The Immortalization Commission

The Strange Quest to Cheat Death

$33.18

  • Paperback

    288 pages

  • Release Date

    15 March 2012

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Summary

A revelatory secret history of our delusional quest for immortality.

SUNDAY TIMES, NEW STATESMAN and TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR

At the heart of all human experience lies our obsession with death. For many years we turned to religion for answers, but with the twentieth century came ideas from evolution and politics to suggest that our lives - and afterlives - were in our own hands. Such ideas went on to have both trivial and terrible effects - from a sweeping craze of seances to the…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780141041889
ISBN-10:0141041889
Author:John Gray
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Imprint:Penguin Books Ltd
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:288
Release Date:15 March 2012
Weight:216g
Dimensions:198mm x 131mm x 17mm
What They're Saying

Critics Review

A visionary … one of the most reliably provocative and heterodox voices in British intellectual life today

The most prescient of British public intellectuals * Financial Times *Gray has consistently anticipated the shape of things to come … he teaches us that true humanism is to be found in uncertainty and doubt – Will SelfThe closest thing we have to a window-smashing French intellectual – Andrew MarrA visionary … one of the most reliably provocative and heterodox voices in British intellectual life today * New Statesman *Gray is a philosophical maverick, a pricker of bubbles, a deflater of balloons, a true iconoclast for whom our chief competing accounts of existence - the religious and the humanist - are both fatally flawed * Globe and Mail *Deeply thoughtful, brilliantly narrated – Raymond Tallis * Literary Review *A romp of a read … John Gray is a connoisseur of human idiocy – John Banville * Guardian *Our sharpest critic of utopian fantasies skewers the crazed but enduring dream of cheating age, time and death – Boyd Tonkin * Independent *John Gray, the counter-prophet who scorns all claims that humans can transcend the human condition … You don’t have to agree with Gray to enjoy the fireworks – Marek Kohn * Independent *Elegant … He is on to something important regarding the delusion that science consists of indefinite progress * Sunday Telegraph *

About The Author

John Gray

John Gray is the author of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, and False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. He was Professor of Politics at Oxford, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale, and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and now writes full time. His books and articles have been translated into over thirty languages. His selected writings, Gray’s Anatomy, were published by Penguin in 2009.

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