how to live forever and die young

 

'An enthralling essay on the contemporary meaning of dying and death. It is also a book about the meaning of life... Appleyard chronicles with admirable and often dazzling accessibility two strands of science that underpin life extension... Appleyard orchestrates an impressive range of genres (history, technology, personal reminiscence, anecdote, anthropology, philosophy) to establish his developing argument about what it means to live and die in the twenty-first century... [A] riveting helter-skelter of a literary journey'
John Cornwell, Sunday Times

‘If there were such a thing as an immortality pill, would you take it? You initial reaction might be, “Yes, of course,” but that’s before you’ve had the chance to read this profound, thought-provoking book... Elegant and fluent... And even though his research takes him into some pretty knotty scientific and philosophical areas, he lays the whole thing out in an easily digestible way. The delightful result is that, as a reader, you feel enabled to join in a debate that is almost certainly going to get more urgent with each succeeding decade’
Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday

‘Just what is needed right now – a concise, clear and phenomenally interesting account of the immortality industry... In three hundred fast-moving pages Bryan Appleyard outlines the plots and guiles that people have invented in order to stay alive and in so doing exposes the human species as more foolish, more comic, sadder, and more insane than any of the animal class... The originality of How to Live Forever rests not just in the cornucopia of novel, factual and anecdotal material that the author has garnered for our amusement, but also in the radical, thought-provoking games he plays with his readers. At once he cajoles, flatters, teases and insults them, gets them to understand and agree one novel idea only to have it dashed to pieces as the page is turned’
Alexander Waugh, Literary Review

‘Engaging... A thoughtful and essential meditation on an idea that promises to reside in the zeitgeist for some time to come’
Greg Klerxx, Evening Standard
 
‘Appleyard has a good head. I hope he also possesses the £40,000 that Alcor will charge him to chop it off and preserve it in a vat of liquid nitrogen coolant’
Peter Conrad, Observer
 
‘[Appleyard] is a fine and lucid writer who has produced a book which bubbles with information as well as consistently stimulating speculation’
John Preston, Sunday Telegraph
 
‘His writing has a sinuous insistence, and this fusion of memoir, travelogue and science fact is mostly a provocative delight’
John O’Connell, Time Out

‘Appleyard almost convinces the reader that his immortalists have a case, coaxing us gently into their way of thinking, which feels a bit like turning your worldview inside out like a sock. If the anti-ageing lobby are to be believed, death isn’t a necessary part of life, and if death is optional, then all our philosophical and cultural norms have to be re-thought’
Mary Wakefield, Daily Telegraph
 
‘There are some moments, common only to the best popular science books, when, as someone once said of Richard Dawkins, the author makes the reader feel like a genius... This is a serious, frightening, at times brilliant book on immortality’
William Leith, Spectator

‘Thought-provoking... Appleyard considers, with a sort of humorous, benign scepticism, a swath of current strategies [for life extension]... Appleyard’s book is also a brisk cultural history of ideas of immortality’
Steven Poole, Guardian

‘Fascinating and disturbing’
Daily Mail

‘Appleyard takes us on a tourist-bus trip around the world of those not willing to go quietly. The tour starts on the immortalist frontline, makes stops at Darwinism, spiritualism, and heaven and hell, before delivering us, wide-eyed and a little wiser, back where we started. He is a lively guide to the sights on the way, with a light touch that mixes anecdote and reportage with reflection... Every page contains interesting nuggets on what is perhaps the biggest of all the Big Questions... A few hours in the company of this book would be well spent’
Stephen Cave, Financial Times

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