The Immortalization Commission

This title was selected for "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.

ISBN 1846142199   Pages 288 ISBN13 9781846142192 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 375 Publisher Penguin Books Ltd   Published in London Imprint Allen Lane   Height (mm) 204 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 138 Publication date 27 Jan 2011   Spine width (mm) 28 DEWEY 128.5   Academic level Postgraduate DEWEY edition DC22

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

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