How to Live Forever or Die Trying: On the New Immortality - Couverture souple

'The new season shows there's still an appetite for Big Ideas... youthful Bryan Appleyard explores the idea of immortality in How to Live Forever or Die Trying'
Robert McCrum, 2007 Highlights, Observer 31/12

‘Appleyard perceptively discusses the meaning of immortality and entertainingly explores some of the practical consequences of aspiring to live forever. He vividly portrays the premises where, should you lay out the necessary cash, your body can float forever in a tank of liquid nitrogen, pending a somewhat unlikely physical resurrection. And he also makes you think quite hard about the possible boredom of living forever’
Tom Kirkwood, Peer Review, BBC Focus Magazine April ‘07
'Last week's most reviewed book, How to Live Forever or Die Trying by Bryan Appleyard, drew considerable coverage again at the weekend, with reviews appearing in the Sunday Times, Financial Times, Guardian and Independent, and an extract in the Daily Mail'
The Bookseller 2/2
'Appleyard, starting from the premise that an extended life is now feasible, has written an enthralling essay on the contemporary meaning of dying and death. It is also a book about the meaning of life. As he writes, citing Octavio Paz: "Tell me how you die, and I will tell you how you live." Appleyard chronicles with admirable and often dazzling accessibility two strands of science that underpin life extension. The more respectable the science, the more modest the life extension (decades rather than centuries), but the closer to immortality, the more whacko the science'
Sunday Times 28/1

'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. "The utility of living," wrote the philosopher Montaigne, "consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time." A few hours in the company of this book would be time well spent'
Financial Times 28/1

'Thought-provoking... What can you do in the meantime, before the elixir of youth becomes available at the chemist's? Appleyard considers, with a sort of humorous, benign skepticism, a swath of current strategies, from getting cryonically preserved at death (increasingly respectable), to the fashion for calorie restriction (eating a lot less, because half-starved mice live longer), and merely taking a lot of vitamins and supplements, or exercising. (But be careful: "Excessive exercise will tip the risk scales to the point where the risk of free radical damage outweighs the benefits. In short, the sweating, pumped-up jerk next to you in the gym is killing himself. It is a great consolation.") One scientist thinks the most reliable health advice is: "Be nice, be thin, have daughters."'
Guardian 27/1

'What drives this readable investigation into the 'immortalist' and 'deathist' movements on both sides of the primarily American debate are Appleyard's own thoughts on the issue - both obvious (would you actually want to live to be 657?) and more cerebral (is death crucial to the human experience of love?)... There's a fantastic autobiographical chapter on the death of his parents which is just as happy to reference Six Feet Under as St Augustine'
Metro 24/1

'Why bother to get out of bed in the morning if you knew you'd got 1,000 years in which to achieve your goals? These are the complex issues which Appleyard chews over in this elegant and fluent book. Occasionally he brings his own life experiences into the story without ever seeming to intrude. 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 result is that, as a reader, you feel enabled to join a debate that is certainly going to get more urgent with each decade'
London Lite 23/1

'Just what is needed right now - a concise, clear and phenomenally interesting account of the immortality industry... 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'
Alexander Waugh, Literary Review Feb '07

'The most reviewed title [this week] was Bryan Appleyard's How To Live Forever Or Die Trying, its eternal subject proving a popular topic'
The Bookseller 26/1

'As scientists come ever closer to unlocking the secret of eternal life, one man's very pertinent question - Would You Die of Boredom If You Lived Forever?'
Saturday Essay, Daily Mail 27/1

'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 thought-provoking book... Appleyard chews over [complex issues] in this elegant and fluent book. Occasionally he brings his own life experiences into the story without ever seeming to intrude: for instance he tells us both his parents died in their 50s (the same age he is now). 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'
5 Stars, Mail on Sunday 21/1

'A thoughtful and essential meditation on an idea that promises to reside in the zeitgeist for some time to come, and he ends the book where its successors must surely begin. In a society where life is no longer framed by death, would we still be human at all?'
Evening Standard 15/1

'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'
Observer 21/1

'Bryan Appleyard does not pretend to be a scientist and admits that he has struggled to understand many of the theories involved. He is, however, a fine and lucid writer who has produced a book which bubbles with information as well as consistently stimulating speculation'
Sunday Telegraph 21/1

'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'
Daily Telegraph 20/1

'This is a serious, frightening, at times brilliant book on immortality'
William Leith, The Spectator 20/1
'The new season shows there's still an appetitie for Big Ideas... youthful Bryan Appleyard explores the idea of immortality in How to Live Forever or Die Trying'
Robert McCrum, 2007 Highlights, Observer 31/12
'One of the most unjustly neglected books of the year is Bryan Appleyard's How to Live Forever or Die Trying... Appleyard predicts a future of super-rich old people living on accumulated interest from their investments and super-poor young people, whose numbers include not only the overwhelming majority of the world's population who can't afford expensive medicine, but the children of the rich who are denied their inheritances because their parents refuse to die'
Nick Cohen, Observer 12/8
'You're 80 and on your deathbed. Someone offers you a pill that would indefinitely restore you to your 29-year-old self. Save for murder or an accident, you'd be untouchable. An offer you can't refuse? Sunday Times writer Bryan Appleyard imagines a world where those who could afford such a procedure - not such a pipe dream, according to many - went through with it. Would culture get killed? Would love be devalued? Would suicides skyrocket? And if we were all immortal, where would that leave God? .... Appleyard's brisk cultural history ... bristles with intelligence and imagination'
Evening Standard 18/02

'Would you like to live forever? Or, like the biblical Methuselah, for, say, twelve hundred years? For every one of us who wouldn't, there will be some one who would. Yet many doctors and scientists now believe that the first person is already alive for whom either immortality or near-immortality is possible. So Appleyard, an incisive journalist and author of iconoclastic books, has done us all stout service by raising this fascinating, and possibly intractable, issue.
He touches all the bases: the literature, philosophy, history, science, psychology and medicine that is germane. His approach is wonderfully eclectic, and crammed with fascinating facts. Michigan's Cryonics Institute, for example, “has been forced to reclassify itself as a cemetery”. In search of the right questions, let alone their answers, he has travelled the world and interviewed those who believe - and those who don't. His prose is crisp, lucid and, at times, splendidly wry"
The Times 16/02

'I want to live for ever!' sang the Kids from Fame, and they are not alone: the search for immortality has been a constant human refrain throughout history. But medical science has improved at an exponential rate in recent decades, and there are those who believe that the first person to live to be 1,000 years old has already been born.
What has happened to get people so excited about the prospect of eternal life? And if they are right, what would it mean for us as human beings? If death became negotiable, would we still fall in love, create art, go hang-gliding, have children? Would we still, in fact, be human?
Both a hugely entertaining history of our obsession with immortality and a revealing snapshot of how it is being pursued, How to Live Forever or Die Trying tackles these and myriad other questions with dazzling skill. Funny, thought-provoking and often profound, it manages to grapple with the big issues of existence without blinding the reader with science, and sheds new light on why we are the way we are.
Praise for Aliens: Why They Are Here
'An astonishing book, as entertaining as it is thought-provoking' Glasgow Herald
'Endlessly fascinating . . . A profound meditation on what it means to be human' John Gray, New Statesman
'An intoxicating intellectual journey, [with] an impressive variety of wonderful stories and oddball characters' Sunday Times
[NB INSIDE PRINTING FOR AUTHOR PHOTO & BIOGRAPHY]
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