
Pub Date: July 2013
What have we not done to live forever? The critically acclaimed author of The Fruit Hunters—now an award-winning documentary film—weaves together religion, science, and mythology in a gripping exploration of the most universal of human obsessions: immortality.
Raised an atheist, Adam Leith Gollner was struck by mankind’s tireless efforts to cheat aging and death. In a narrative that pivots between profundity and hilarity, he brings us into the world of those whose lives are shaped by a belief in immortality. From a Jesuit priest on his deathbed to anti-aging researchers at Harvard, Gollner—sorting truth from absurdity—canvasses religion and science for insight, along with an array of cults, myths, and fringe figures.
He journeys to David Copperfield’s archipelago in the Bahamas, where the magician claims to have found “a liquid that reverses genes.” He attends a costume party set in the year 2068 with a group of radical life-extensionists, explores a cryonics facility, and soaks in the transformative mineral waters at the Esalen Institute. Looking to history, Gollner visits St. Augustine, Florida, where Ponce de Leon is thought to have sought the fountain of youth.
Combining immersive reporting, rigorous research, and lyrical prose, Gollner charts the rise of longevity science from its alchemical beginnings to modern-day genetic interventions. He explores the symbolic representation of eternal life and its connection to water. Interlaced throughout is a compelling meditation on the nature of belief. An incredible thinker with “the talents of an investigative journalist, poet, travel writer, and humorist grafted onto one unusual specimen” (Mary Roach, The New York Times Book Review), Adam Leith Gollner has written a rollicking and revelatory examination of our age-old notion of living forever.
Adam Leith Gollner has written for The New York Times, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, The Globe and Mail, and Good magazine. The former editor of Vice Magazine, he is also a musician and filmmaker. He lives in Montreal and Los Angeles.
The Fruit Hunters Adam Leith Gollner and Miracle Fruit
Adam Leith Gollner explores the intriguing miracle berry and the politics and controversies surrounding it as well as its incredible capabilities
My Key to Immortality: Tuning Your Mind into the Life of Universal Love provides the author’s thoughts on various aspects of her life with a purpose to opening the reader’s mind, as a preparation to transitioning one’s consciousness to the next level, while discovering new dimensions of life. These simple realizations decode the “immortality”—eternal life of love and happiness. Since the realization is individual for each human being, the writer refrains from providing definitions and explanations, but rather asks questions, leading you to clues to finding your own treasure and keys to opening new doors.
Working as a medical examiner, Dr. Janis Amatuzio has found that by listening and talking to loved ones of the deceased, she can offer them a sense of closure. In doing so, she has heard — and here retells — extraordinary stories of spiritual and otherworldly events surrounding the transition between life and death.
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A fascinating work of popular philosophy and history that both enlightens and entertains, Stephen Cave’s Immortality investigates whether it just might be possible to live forever and whether we should want to. But it also makes a powerful argument, which is that it’s our very preoccupation with defying mortality that drives civilization.
The archetypal and symbolic qualities of mystical states of consciousness are ineffable, timeless, and fleeting, but they act as powerful reminders that it is possible to transcend our limited understanding to glimpse a unified eternal reality, which we are part of. The pilgrimage of life ends in death–there is no denial of this fact, but in Immortal Yearnings, we are asked to consider whether by giving the symbolism from universal imaginings a voice, we can use our perception to enrich our myths about death.
Annamaria Hemingway, Ph.D., is a writer, speaker, and spiritual counselor in the practice of conscious living and dying. A personal quest to discover a deeper purpose to the pilgrimage of life led her on a path to study world religious and spiritual traditions, ancient rites and rituals, mystical states of consciousness, and universal cultural mythologies surrounding death and dying. She received an MA in Consciousness Psychology, and was also granted an MA/PhD in Mythological Studies with an Emphasis on Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She has worked in hospice care, and is a member of the International Association for Near-Death Studies.
