Download or read book No Such Thing as Immortality written by Sarah Tranter and published by Choc Lit Limited. This book was released on 2014-06-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vampires are not vulnerable to emotion—so when a master of the night finds himself overwhelmed by a woman, he must understand why . . . Nathaniel Gray is a wild child of the undead. So when he drag races his friend through the English countryside, he goes all out—until one instant changes him forever. An instant of raw emotion that is unlike anything he’s ever felt before—and that sends him into a car wreck no mortal could walk away from. When he tears himself out of the metal carnage, he is stunned to discover the source of the emotional storm is the beautiful young Rowan Locke, whose fury and fear had slammed through Nate’s ironclad psyche without a struggle. Consumed with a desire to know Rowan—and learn how she has such an effect on him—Nate finds himself protecting her from the dangers of her world and his own. Because as much as he may try to resist his feelings, he simply cannot resist her . . .
Download or read book The Book of Immortality written by Adam Gollner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of one of the most universal human obsessions charts the rise of longevity science from its alchemical beginnings to modern-day genetic interventions and enters the world of those whose lives are shaped by a belief in immortality.
Download or read book Pilgrim written by Timothy Findley and published by HarperCollins Canada. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ageless. Sexless. Deathless. Timeless. Pilgrim is a man who cannot die, an astounding character in a novel of the cataclysmic contest between creation and destruction. Pilgrim is Timothy Findley’s masterwork, a finalist for the Giller Prize, and a national bestseller that has smashed the author’s own impressive sales records. It is 1912 and Pilgrim has been admitted to the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zürich, Switzerland, having failed—once again—to commit suicide. Over the next two years, it is up to Carl Jung, self-professed mystical scientist of the mind, to help Pilgrim unlock his unconsciousness, etched as it is with myriad sufferings and hopes of history. Is Pilgrim mad, or is he condemned to live forever, witness to the terrible tragedy and beauty of the human condition? Both intimate and expansive in its scope, with an absorbing parade of characters—mythic, fictional and historical—Pilgrim is a fiercely original and powerful story from one of our most distinguished artists.
Download or read book The Resurrected Dead Now Immortal Live Among Us written by Jhershierra and published by Booklocker.Com Incorporated. This book was released on 2004-03 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Matthew, Jesus commands his disciples to, "Raise the Dead." These resurrected Immortals are living among us. Personal encounters with Immortals, practical steps to immortality and the truth about the greatest "mistake" in human history are revealed in this book.
Download or read book Immortality Defended written by John Leslie and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Might we be parts of a divine mind? Could anything like anafterlife make sense? Starting with a Platonic answer to why theworld exists, Immortality Defended suggests we could well beimmortal in all of three separate ways. Tackles the fundamental questions posed by our very existence,among them, "why does the cosmos exist?", "is there a divine mindor God?", and "in what sense might we have afterlives?" Defends a belief in immortality, without the need for areligious affiliation or rejection of modern science Explores the ideas of "Einsteinian immortality", the divineafterlife, and the theory of an infinite and divine mind Draws from the work of a wide-range of philosophers, fromancient Greece to the present day, and incorporates up-to-datescientific findings Written in a thought-provoking and engaging manner, accessibleto anyone intrigued by the wonder of our being
Download or read book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks written by Rebecca Skloot and published by Crown. This book was released on 2010-02-02 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The story of modern medicine and bioethics—and, indeed, race relations—is refracted beautifully, and movingly.”—Entertainment Weekly NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM HBO® STARRING OPRAH WINFREY AND ROSE BYRNE • ONE OF THE “MOST INFLUENTIAL” (CNN), “DEFINING” (LITHUB), AND “BEST” (THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER) BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS • WINNER OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR NONFICTION NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Entertainment Weekly • O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • Financial Times • New York • Independent (U.K.) • Times (U.K.) • Publishers Weekly • Library Journal • Kirkus Reviews • Booklist • Globe and Mail Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of. Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance? Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
Download or read book Spinoza s Heresy written by Steven Nadler and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2001-12-06 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the heart of Spinoza's Heresy is a mystery: why was Baruch Spinoza so harshly excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community at the age of twenty-four? In this philosophical sequel to his acclaimed, award-winning biography of the seventeenth-century thinker, Steven Nadler argues that Spinoza's main offence was a denial of the immortality of the soul. But this only deepens the mystery. For there is no specific Jewish dogma regarding immortality: there is nothing that a Jew is required to believe about the soul and the afterlife. It was, however, for various religious, historical and political reasons, simply the wrong issue to pick on in Amsterdam in the 1650s. After considering the nature of the ban, or cherem, as a disciplinary tool in the Sephardic community, and a number of possible explanations for Spinoza's ban, Nadler turns to the variety of traditions in Jewish religious thought on the postmortem fate of a person's soul. This is followed by an examination of Spinoza's own views on the eternity of the mind and the role that that the denial of personal immortality plays in his overall philosophical project. Nadler argues that Spinoza's beliefs were not only an outgrowth of his own metaphysical principles, but also a culmination of an intellectualist trend in Jewish rationalism.
Download or read book Immortal written by Clay Jones and published by Harvest House Publishers. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is There Life After Death? For many, death is terrifying. We try to live as long as possible while hoping that science will soon find a way to allow us to live, if not forever, then at least a very long time. Whether we deny our mortality though literal or symbolic immortality or try to turn death into something benign, our attempts fail us. But what if the real solution is not in denying death’s reality, but in acknowledging it while enjoying a hope for a wonderful forever? Clay Jones, a professor of Christian apologetics, explores the ways people face death and how these “immortality projects” are unsuccessful, even destructive. Along the way, he points to the hope of the only true immortality available to all—the truth that God already offers a path to our hearts’ deepest longing: glorious resurrection to eternal life.
Download or read book Immortality and the Philosophy of Death written by Michael Cholbi and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-12-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of seminal articles investigating whether death is bad for us – and if so, whether immortality would be good for us.
Download or read book The Skeleton Cupboard The Making of a Clinical Psychologist written by Tanya Byron and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2015-04-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The gripping, unforgettable, and deeply affecting story of a young clinical psychologist learning how she can best help her patients, The Skeleton Cupboard is a riveting and revealing memoir that offers fascinating insight into the human mind. In The Skeleton Cupboard, Professor Tanya Byron recounts the stories of the patients who most influenced her career as a mental health practitioner. Spanning her years of training—years in which Byron was forced her to contend with the harsh realities of the lives of her patients and confront a dark moment in her own family's past—The Skeleton Cupboard is a compelling and compassionate account of how much health practitioners can learn from those they treat. Among others, we meet Ray, a violent sociopath desperate to be shown tenderness and compassion; Mollie, a talented teenager intent on starving herself; and Imogen, a twelve-year old so haunted by a secret that she's intent on killing herself. Byron brings the reader along as she uncovers the reasons each of these individuals behave the way they do, resulting in a thrilling, compulsively readable psychological mystery that sheds light on mental illness and what its treatment tells us about ourselves.
Download or read book Death and Immortality in Ancient Philosophy written by Alex Long and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-13 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an accessible account of the variety and subtlety of Greek and Roman philosophy of death, from Homer to Marcus Aurelius.
Download or read book Immortality and the Law written by Ray D. Madoff and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes a riveting look at how the law responds to that distinctly American dream of immortality. While American law provides virtually no protections for the interests we hold most dear—our bodies and our reputations—when it comes to property interests, the American dead have greater control than anywhere else in the world. Moreover, these rights are growing daily. From grave robbery to Elvis impersonators, Madoff shows how the law of the dead has a direct impact on how we live. Madoff examines how the rising power of the American dead enables the deceased to exert control over their wealth forever through grandiose schemes like "dynasty trusts" and perpetual private charitable foundations and to control their creative works and identities well into the unforeseeable future. Madoff explores how the law of the dead can, in essence, extend the reach of life by granting virtual immortality to individuals. All of this comes, Madoff contends, at real costs imposed on the living.
Download or read book When Breath Becomes Air written by Paul Kalanithi and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.
Download or read book Immortality written by Stephen Cave and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a cloud-capped peak where gods and immortals while away their infinite days, and since the dawn of humanity everyone - whether they know it or not - has been trying to climb that mountain. But there are only four paths up its treacherous slope. Throughout history, people have wagered everything on their choice and fought wars against those who've decided differently. Each of these four paths - simply staying alive indefinitely, through magic or medicine; being resurrected; persisting as a soul; or living on through one's legacy - is revealed to us by a historical figure who serves as our guide. It is through these diverse individuals - such as the Egyptian queen Nefertiti; vitamin-obsessed Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling; author Mary Shelley; and Alexander the Great - that we come to understand how many of civilisation's greatest achievements have been born of our need to see our essence endure. As optimistic about the human condition as it is insightful, Immortality takes the reader on an eye-opening journey from the beginnings of civilisation to the present day. Bringing together history and philosophy, this fascinating book both enlightens and entertains, investigating whether it just might be possible to live forever, and whether that's something we should actually aspire to. But its most powerful and arresting argument is this - that it is our very preoccupation with defying mortality that has made our civilisation what it is.
Download or read book Immortality written by Stephen Cave and published by Crown. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you could live forever, would you want to? Both a fascinating look at the history of our strive for immortality and an investigation into whether living forever is really all it’s cracked up to be. A fascinating work of popular philosophy and history that both enlightens and entertains, Stephen Cave investigates whether it just might be possible to live forever and whether we should want to. He also makes a powerful argument that it’s our very preoccupation with defying mortality that drives civilization. Central to this book is the metaphor of a mountaintop where one can find the Immortals. Since the dawn of humanity, everyone – whether they know it or not—has been trying to climb that mountain. But there are only four paths up its treacherous slope, and there have only ever been four paths. Throughout history, people have wagered everything on their choice of the correct path, and fought wars against those who’ve chosen differently. In drawing back the curtain on what compels humans to “keep on keeping on,” Cave engages the reader in a number of mind-bending thought experiments. He teases out the implications of each immortality gambit, asking, for example, how long a person would live if they did manage to acquire a perfectly disease-free body. Or what would happen if a super-being tried to round up the atomic constituents of all who’ve died in order to resurrect them. Or what our loved ones would really be doing in heaven if it does exist. We’re confronted with a series of brain-rattling questions: What would happen if tomorrow humanity discovered that there is no life but this one? Would people continue to please their boss, vie for the title of Year’s Best Salesman? Would three-hundred-year projects still get started? If the four paths up the Mount of the Immortals lead nowhere—if there is no getting up to the summit—is there still reason to live? And can civilization survive? Immortality is a deeply satisfying book, as optimistic about the human condition as it is insightful about the true arc of history.
Download or read book Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics written by Thomas de Zengotita and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the origins of the academic culture wars of the late 20th century and examines their lasting influence on the humanities and progressive politics. It puts us in a position to ask this question: what to make now of those furious debates over postmodernism, multiculturalism, relativism, critical theory, deconstruction, post-structuralism, and all the rest? In an effort to arrive at a fair judgment on that question, the book reaches for an understanding of postmodern theorists by way of two genres they despised and hopes, for that very reason, to do them justice. It tells a story, and in the telling, advances two basic claims: first, that the phenomenological/hermeneutical tradition is the most suitable source of theory for a humanism that aspires to be universal; and, second, that the ethical and political aspect of the human condition is authentically accessible only through narrative. In conclusion, it argues that the postmodern moment was a necessary one, or will have been if we rise to the occasion and seize the opportunity it offers: a truly universal humanism might yet be realized even in—or perhaps especially in—this atavistic hour of parochial populism.
Download or read book Our Stories written by John Martin Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-06 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essays on the metaphysical issues pertaining to death, the meaning of life, and freedom of the will, John Martin Fischer argues (against the Epicureans) that death can be a bad thing for the individual who dies. He defends the claim that something can be a bad thing--a misfortune--for an individual, even if he never experiences it as bad (and even if he does not any longer exist). Fischer also defends the commonsense asymmetry in our attitudes toward death and prenatal nonexistence: we are indifferent to the time before we are born, but we regret that we do not live longer. Further, Fischer argues (against the immortality curmudgeons, such as Heidegger and Bernard Williams), that immortal life could be desirable, and shows how the defense of the (possible) badness of death and the (possible) goodness of immortality exhibit a similar structure; on Fischer's view, the badness of death and the goodness of life can be represented on spectra that display certain continuities. Building on Fischer's previous book, My Way a major aim of this volume is to show important connections between issues relating to life and death and issues relating to free will. More specifically, Fischer argues that we endow our lives with a certain distinctive kind of meaning--an irreducible narrative dimension of value--by exhibiting free will. Thus, in acting freely, we transform our lives so that our stories matter.
