The immortalization commission : science and the strange quest to cheat death

Gray takes two major examples: the belief among a group of Edwardian intellectuals that there was a form of life after death (accessed through mediums and automatic writing), and the certainty that the science-backed Communism of the new USSR could reshape the planet, remaking mankind and freeing it from death--and in the process returning revolutionary leaders such as Lenin back to life. He interweaves these with extraordinary stories of philosophers, politicians, spiritualists, embalmers, crazed inventors, love-struck psychical researchers, journalist spies and mass killers, all of whom were driven by a specifically modern world view according to which science could make humanity invincible. 'The Immortalization Commission' raises a host of fascinating questions about what it means to be human. The great and terrible implication of Darwin's ideas was that natural selection made humans into animals like any other, doomed one day to disappear from the face of an uncaring earth.