Author:John Gray
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 séances 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.
The most prescient of British public intellectuals
—— Financial TimesGray has consistently anticipated the shape of things to come ... he teaches us that true humanism is to be found in uncertainty and doubt
—— Will SelfThe closest thing we have to a window-smashing French intellectual
—— Andrew MarrA visionary ... one of the most reliably provocative and heterodox voices in British intellectual life today
—— New StatesmanGray 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 MailDeeply thoughtful, brilliantly narrated
—— Raymond Tallis , Literary ReviewA romp of a read ... John Gray is a connoisseur of human idiocy
—— John Banville , GuardianOur sharpest critic of utopian fantasies skewers the crazed but enduring dream of cheating age, time and death
—— Boyd Tonkin , IndependentJohn Gray, the counter-prophet who scorns all claims that humans can transcend the human condition ... You don't have to agree with Gray to enjoy the fireworks
—— Marek Kohn , IndependentElegant ... He is on to something important regarding the delusion that science consists of indefinite progress
—— Sunday TelegraphGray is an engaging writer, an entertaining historian and a controversialist whose opinions can never be taken for granted
—— New Statesman