The Immortalization Commission by John Gray
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.
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 *
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 *
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.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781846142192 |
| ISBN 10 | 1846142199 |
| Title | The Immortalization Commission |
| Author | John Gray |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Penguin Books Ltd |
| Year published | 2011-01-27 |
| Number of pages | 288 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |