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W. W. Norton & Company : College Books

Being Human

Endorsements

"Being Human [is a] most unusual doument....[It is a] compelling portrait of what it means to be human; what it means to long for perfection, to suffer illness, to warily seek immortality....Eliminate all suffering, postpone or weaken a sense of mortality, ease all trauma, and what is left may be something less than human...[w]hich is precisely why Nabokov, Tolstoy and Frederick Douglass are here called to testify."
—Edward Rothstein, The New York Times

"A most fascinating project...Being Human range[s] from the ancient ‘Epic of Gilgamesh,’ with its primal questions about mortality, to the screenplay for the futuristic movie Gattaca. The heavy hitters of literary history are well represented: Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Homer, Ovid, C. S. Lewis, Plutarch, Descartes, Camus, Whitman, George Eliot, Plato, Tolstoy, and St. Augustine. As a recent headline reminded us, ‘The Altered Human is Already Here’...and as we explore this strange new world, the best thinkers of the past make wise companions."
—Gregory M. Lamb, The Christian Science Monitor

"A rich mélange of a book, traveling over multifarious topics, genres, and moods as well as several millennia...[Being Human] offer[s] a profound meditation on the knot of questions that must be raised before one can make anything like an informed decision about [today’s] momentous issues."
—Roger Kimball, The New Criterion