The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death - Couverture rigide

Gray, John

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0374175063 ISBN 13 : 9780374175061

Editeur : Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2011

Synopsis

Book by Gray John

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

SUNDAY TIMES, NEW STATESMAN and TLS BOOKS OF THE YEAR An obsession with the nature of death lies at the heart of the human experience. For most of our history religion provided a clear explanation for life and the afterlife. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this framework came under relentless pressure as new ideas - from psychiatry to evolution to Communism - seemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands. We would ourselves become God. The Immortalization Commission raises a host of fascinating questions about what it means to be human. The great and terrible implication of Darwin's ideas was that natural selection made humans into animals like any other, doomed one day to disappear from the face of an uncaring Earth. The refusal to follow this logic and to insist instead on our immortality resulted in a series of experiments that carry on to the present day, some of which ravaged whole countries and some of which generated more private forms of pain. The implications of Gray's book will haunt the reader for the rest of their lives - and perhaps beyond.

Revue de presse

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 Self )

The closest thing we have to a window-smashing French intellectual (Andrew Marr )

A 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 )

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Date d'édition: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0374175063
• ISBN 13: 9780374175061
• Reliure: Relié
• Langue: anglais
• Nombre de pages: 272
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible