Author: Paul (Page 24 of 171)

Welcome to Halfman, Halfbook for my stop on the Blog Tour for The Price of Immortality by Peter Ward and published by Melville House.

This is part of the Blog Tour to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Melville House. They are an independent publisher located in Brooklyn, New York with an office in London. It was founded in 2001 by sculptor Valerie Merians and fiction writer/journalist Dennis Johnson, in order to publish Poetry After 9/11, a book of material culled from Johnson’s groundbreaking MobyLives book blog. The material consisted of things sent into the blog by writers and poets in response to the 9/11 attacks, and Johnson and Merians felt it better represented the spirit of New York than the call to war of the Bush administration.

Melville House is also well-known for its fiction, with two Nobel Prize winners on its list: Imre Kertesz and Heinrich Boll. In particular, the company has developed a world-wide reputation for its rediscovery of forgotten international writers — its translation of a forgotten work by Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone, launched a world-wide phenomenon. The company also takes pride in its discovery of many first-time writers — such as Lars Iyer (Spurious), Tao Lin (Shoplifting from American Apparel), Jeremy Bushnell (The Weirdness) and Christopher Boucher (How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive) — all of whom have gone on to greater success.

About the Book

In the tradition of Jon Ronson and Tim Wu, an absorbing and revelatory journey into the American Way of Defying Death

As longevity medicine revolutionizes the lives of many older people, the quest to take the next step—to live as long as we choose—has spurred a scientific arms race, funded by Big Tech and Silicon Valley, in search of the elixir of life. Once the stuff of Mesopotamian mythology and episodes of Star Trek, as the pace of technological progress quickens, proposals to make humans immortal are becoming increasingly credible. It has also empowered a wild-eyed fringe of pseudo-scientists, tech visionaries, scam-artists, and religious fanatics who have given their lives to the pursuit of immortality.

Peter Ward’s The Price of Immortality is a probing, deeply reported, nuanced — and sometimes very funny — exploration of the current state of the race for immortality and an attempt to sort the swindlers from the scientists, while also analyzing the potentially devastating consequences should humanity realize its ultimate dream. Starting off at the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida and exploring the feuding subcultures around the nascent cryonics industry that first emerged in the wake of World War 2, Ward immerses himself into an eccentric world of startups, scientific institutions, tech billionaires and life-extension conferences, in order to find out if immortality is within our grasp, and what the cost might be if we choose to take what some people think is the next step in human evolution.

About the Author

Author Photo

Peter Ward is a British business and technology reporter whose reporting has taken him across the globe. Reporting from Dubai, he covered the energy sector in the Middle East before earning a degree in business journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His writing has appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, The Economist, GQ, BBC Science Focus, and Newsweek.

My Review

Who wants to live forever? sings Freddie Mercury in the Queen song. But who does? I grew up knowing that getting your three score and ten in was a good thing, but thanks to modern healthcare people are living way beyond that. But in the end, there is always death, it is as inevitable as taxes and your computer crashing.

There are people out there who do not think that death is for them. They are seeking that elusive and magic elixir of life that they will hope will give them that chance of immortality. What technology and medical advances are there out there that people are hoping might solve the problem. In this book, Peter Ward tries to find out where the money is and to see if it is actually going to work.

He begins this journey at the appropriately named Church of Perpetual Life. This organisation is not a Christian organisation but rather they describe themselves as a science faith-based church. Its members are drawn from all over the place but they all have the desire to live for a long time. They know that they can’t avoid death at the moment, but some want to live until they are 150 in the hope that as yet uninvented technologies will be available to help them live longer again.

For those that aren’t going to live that long, they are hoping that cryonics will mean that their bodies or just their heads can be preserved to be resurrected at some indeterminate point in the future. The technique has been around for a long while, but strangely enough, no one knows if it will actually work…

Ward takes us through all of these different techniques. Some of them sound plausible and based on strong science such as research into other animals that have extraordinarily long lives. There are other techniques that seem to be pedalled by charlatans and snake oil salesmen that stand more chance of shortening your life.

I thought that this was a fascinating and informative read about the search for immortality, He is open to hearing what these people have to say and tries to find out why they are seeking this path. He takes a rational look at the house of smoke and mirrors that is this industry, going in with an open mind and presenting the facts. He acknowledges that we can make people live longer with much better health care and details some of the differences in the state for those wealthy enough to have cover to pay for their medical bills. He has a great writing style, and this makes it an easy read for a complex subject. Well worth reading

Don’t forget to visit the other blogs on the blog tour

Buy this at your local independent bookshop. If you’re not sure where your nearest is then you can find one here

My thanks to Nikki Griffiths for the copy of the book to read.

Welcome to Halfman, Halfbook for my stop on the Blog Tour for Villager by Tom Cox and published by Unbound.

About the Book

There’s so much to know. It will never end, I suspect, even when it does. So much in all these lives, so many stories, even in this small place.

Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over and irreversibly etched into its history as an omniscient, somewhat crabby, presence keeps track of village life.

In the late sixties a Californian musician blows through Underhill where he writes a set of haunting folk songs that will earn him a group of obsessive fans and a cult following. Two decades later, a couple of teenagers disturb a body on the local golf course. In 2019, a pair of lodgers discover a one-eyed rag doll hidden in the walls of their crumbling and neglected home. Connections are forged and broken across generations, but only the landscape itself can link them together. A landscape threatened by property development and superfast train corridors and speckled by the pylons whose feet have been buried across the moor.

About the Author

He is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling The Good, the Bad and the Furry and the William Hill Sports Book longlisted Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia. 21st-Century Yokel was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize, and the titular story of Help the Witch won a Shirley Jackson Award. @cox_tom

Tom Cox has 80k followers on Twitter and 33k on Instagram. He is also the man behind the enormously popular Why My Cat is Sad account, which has 240k followers. He lives in Devon.

My Review

The Dartmoor village of Underhill is exactly where you would expect, under a hill. It has a long history of occupation, the stone circle taking it back beyond recorded history. Some of the stories from the landscape have gone forever but others have permeated the local folklore if you know where to look.

The people that have lived in the village over this have their own stories to tell and the narrative switches between different characters from 100 years ago to almost 150 years in the future. They all have a different story to tell of their time spent there, from the music that was created there and became a cult in its own right. There is the story of a doctor seeing the ghost of a woman in a ruined barn and the discovery of a body by two golf man teenagers.

Each of these stories is connected by the main character of the book; the landscape. Its presence is often brooding and sometimes comforting in each of these short vignettes and it feels like it is watching over the inhabitants of the village as they change the land for better or for worse.

The stones will talk, I think, if you give them long enough

I have been a big fan of Tom Cox for ages, so much so that I have even read his golf book, and I really liked this. It took a few days to grow on me, and this, like his non-fiction, is full of quirks and tiny details that make me wonder just where he gets his ideas from. I really liked the underlying rumble of folk horror in the stories, it is there like a satisfying bass line in a favourite track, not enough to scare you, but enough to give a feeling of unease. It is not a conventional novel by any means and is a strong reflection of his interests and passions. I am so glad that I read this, if it wasn’t for Unbound then we may not have seen this as most publishers wouldn’t consider this a commercial book. I still think that his non-fiction writing has an edge over this, but I am very much looking forward to whatever he writes next.

Don’t forget to visit the other blogs on the blog tour

Buy this at your local independent bookshop. If you’re not sure where your nearest is then you can find one here

My thanks to Anne Cater from Random Things Tours for the copy of the book to read.

Welcome to Halfman, Halfbook for my stop on the Blog Tour for Machine Journey by Richard Doyle.

About the Book

Machine Journey is a pamphlet of poems and flash fictions. Travel the road from Slough to Mars. Discover wild visions, strange tales and machine futures. Scramble your way to the prefect stroke

About the Author

Author Photo

Richard Doyle is an old-school SF fan who began writing seriously in 2001. He has a Diploma in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and collaborated on a book in 2006. He has had poems published in the UK poetry magazines Orbis and Sarasvati and is a regular member of the Bristol Stanza Poetry Group. His debut pamphlet “The death of the sentence” was published in 2020. Two of his poems appear in the Bristol Stanza pamphlet “The Weather Indoors” (2021).

My Review

This is a strange and eclectic collection of verse and prose. There are poems about being a writer and how he shuffles scenes of death and dramatic entrances. It is the first collection that I have read that had something about Slough of all places.

He moves from the Stone Age with the poem called the Stone Computer about the screen that has not displayed an image for hundreds of years to the far future and a trip to Mars.

I particularly liked the Collision With A Greenberg, kind of a green punk story about an event that took place and Encounter with an Angel where someone has an angel reach out to touch them and The Trouble With Spaceships and novel and possibly illegal ways of travelling to Mars.

I liked this short collection. Doyle has drawn on subjects that are niche and wide-ranging. They are quirky and infused with gentle humour and are a pleasure to read.

Don’t forget to visit the other blogs on the blog tour

Buy this at your local independent bookshop. If you’re not sure where your nearest is then you can find one here

My thanks to Isabelle Keynon for the copy of the book to read.