The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death

Description

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 mass-murders of the Stalinist terror. Gray raises vital questions about the 'truths' science can offer, the technology we are still exploiting for immortality - and exactly what it means to be human.

John Gray is most recently the acclaimed 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. Having been Professor of Politics at Oxford, Visiting Professor at Harvard and Yale and Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, he 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.

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 * 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 * Gray is an engaging writer, an entertaining historian and a controversialist whose opinions can never be taken for granted * New Statesman *