Book description
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 s ances 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.
