Former Vice editor Gollner (The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession, 2008) may have felt he would need to achieve immortality in order to write this comprehensive, busy book, which bulges with the results of his reading, interviewing and traveling.
By the time his many journeys ended (he notes that he took quite a few he did not write about), the author had settled on the ideas that living forever is/will be impossible and that science is just another name for a belief system. After his introductory comments (that feature the puissance of a particular dream), he examines formal belief systems about immortality—conventional religions and otherwise. He notes the importance of water in many belief systems—“a symbol of all we don’t know.” The most intriguing sections concern Gollner’s connections with illusionist David Copperfield, who has claimed to have found a fountain of youth in the Bahamas. The author visited Copperfield’s islands, and much enjoyed the amenities, but was unable to convince the magician to show him the site—ongoing research, said Copperfield. Throughout these sections, the author also summarizes the role of youth-producing waters in mythology and legend. He then turns to scientific research and discovery in human aging and notes that cells simply cannot live forever, so science holds out no realistic ultimate hope for lives much extended. He also examines some Southern California daffy thinking and visits one of the storage sites for frozen corpses. (Yes, the separate head and torso of Hall of Fame baseball player Ted Williams are waiting for later thawing.) Gollner ends with Buddhism and some words about the “life force.”
An entertaining, well-researched account of the quest that brims with our fond hopes, foolishness and even desperation.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0942-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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