How to Live Forever or Die Trying by Bryan Appleyard

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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? Hacky he may be - and there's something inescapably cut and pasted about a lot of this - but Appleyard's brisk cultural history still bristles with intelligence and imagination.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk
"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 ability to cheat death will soon be within our reach: the first person to live to be 1,000 years old has, they say, 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 or have children? Would we still, in fact, be human? 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.