The Living End – Guy Brown ***

Take a glance at the cover of Guy Brown’s book and what does it seem to be about? I have to confess I thought it was fishermen, and with a title like that, the collapse of the fishing industry. I don’t say this to complain about the book design, though I will be doing that shortly, but to highlight the way the true topic doesn’t really encourage the reader in, which is presumably why the cover doesn’t feature graves or something similar. It’s about death, ageing and immortality, but mostly death.

Let’s get that design moan out of the way. Apart from the misleading cover design, this little hardback doesn’t look unattractive, but open it up and there’s horror inside. The text is plastered across the page in a largish sans serif font, heading way into the gutters at the side with very small paragraph indentations. The result is such a big, undistinguished block of text that it’s very uncomfortable to read. I’ve seen (much) better page layout in books on Lulu.

There’s no doubt that there some interesting stuff in here. I was particularly fascinated that the ‘people only lived until their thirties in the middle ages’ myth was in fact a double inverted myth. People used to assume the fact that the average lifespan of an adult was (say) 35 meant that people mostly lived to 35. More educated books (like, I admit, a couple of mine) spot that this is not really a meaningful number, because there was so much child mortality. We also see quite a few well known individuals live to their 50s, 60s, and 70s. So the assumption is that lifespans weren’t vast different from now, if you survived to be an adult.

However Brown shows that, though child mortality was hugely dominant in (say) the 17th century, the commonest life expectancy of those surviving childhood was mid-thirties. Even this, however proves an over-simplification, because as many people died in their 50s 60s and 70s as died in their 30s and 40s. The reality was that the spread was a lot bigger than now, but it’s too simple to say that most people who survived adulthood reached at least 60.

Towards the end of the book, Brown treats the ideas of life extension, though I found this rather stodgy and miserable for such an interesting subject. And in the end, that’s the fatal (?!) flaw of this book. It’s just a miserable topic. I didn’t want to start it, and as I read it didn’t get any more encouraging. I know everything we read can’t be cheerful and upbeat, but I find it hard to recommend taking on what is clearly an important topic, but nonetheless is one that dampens the soul so thoroughly.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

Search This Blog