Discount Price: $14.95
Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN num: 9781566630184
ISBN number: 1566630185
Label: Ivan R. Dee, Publishing house
Manufacturer: Ivan R. Dee, Publishing house
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 360
Printing Date: March 25, 1993
Publishing house: Ivan R. Dee, Publishing house
Sale Popularity Level: 154712
Studio: Ivan R. Dee, Publishing house
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
A Hollywood millionaire with a terror of death, whose personal physician happens to be working on a theory of longevity--these are the elements of Huxley's caustic and entertaining satire on man's desire to live indefinitely. A highly sensational plot that will keep astonishing you to practically the final sentence. --The New Yorker
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
This is an enjoyable read. Huxley is strong on his philosophical ideals and he moves (sometimes pushes) the story at hand in a certain direction specifically to go on a 10 page rant regarding those ideals. Its definitly worth reading, especially if find it interesting when authors write books about the future that actual come quite true in the decades ahead. I suggest reading this 3rd if you plan to read several of his books...definitly hit up Brave New World, and move to something wild then to this one.
Rated by buyers 
-
A lot of the reviews here make valid points: the philosophical asides are brilliant but tedious for people who don't like philosophy. The characters (the entire plot in fact) do sometimes seem like an afterthought, employed to support the 'big' ideas, but that's not to say they're two-dimensional.
However, when reading a book like this it's important not to get too focused on only one of the many interesting ideas that fly like sparks from Huxley's mind. Explorations of mortality, eroticism, class struggle, mysticism, greed, ...etc. are all presented dispassionately enough. As such, they're like colors on Huxley's palette; and it's not rewarding to complain about a particular shade of green.
The thing that struck me was that Huxley is very specific about the character types he chooses to include here. His decision to pit the grasping Stoyte against the impossibly saint-like Propter elaborates an inner-dialogue one can imagine Huxley was having to reconcile his own idealized world-view with the reality he had encountered in America. In doing this Huxley provides justification and outlines a strategy for implementing his utopian vision.
For me; it's this endeavor to reconcile the world of ideas with reality that, like with much of Hesse's work, seems to be the focal point of the book. I'm looking forward to reading Huxley's later books to see how he develops this attempted reconciliation.
Rated by buyers -
I very first read this book thirty years ago as an adolescent, and it made a big impression on my impressionable, snobbish mind. And it was (is) funny!
Reading it and some other Huxley material this year, I am struck by how singleminded AH is in his ideas. Every essay, every story, at least after the 1930s, is driven by his desire to show how humanity is lost in a maze of materialist illusion. He is a mystic, and if that tickles you, perhaps his extended intellectual diaglogs in this book will interest you. Otherwise, just read the deliciously satirical parts. (His detached prose describing the movements of A nearly naked young starlet's body is a tour de force of clinical eroticism).
His literary skills are enormous, his description of southern california in the 30s rang true in the 70s when I lived there and read it, and still do. His humour, arch, esoteric, but sharp, can be a joy. When he gets serious, that's when he has a problem as he lapses into portentous nonsense about the ground of being, the One, etc. Huxley was a acid head long before he started dabbling with drugs - and his mystical discussions make little sense, unless you are already of that mind. Aesthetically, they are highly repetitive and rather irritating.
Readers who want an introduction to his work would do better, I think, to begin with his best, Brave New World. In that one, he used his considerable gifts to their best advantage, and kept his endless and indulgent maundering to a minimum.
Rated by buyers -
Lurking in the back of every thinking Christian's mind must be this fear: yes, so far Religion has successfully reconciled itself to Science's every last finding. Perhaps the Creation account isn't supposed to be taken literally; maybe the world wasn't really fashioned in six days. But supposing science were to find a way to eliminate death. After all, death appears to be a matter of biology, and should be subject to natural laws. What happens to religion then?
That isn't exactly the question that Huxley addresses in this novel, but it is similar--and his answer is one that should surprise Religion and Science both. And he delivers it with a conclusion so lurid and grotesque it will haunt you long after the rest of the book has faded away.
But getting to the conclusion is the problem. I am a great admirer of Huxley, yet I consider this to be one of his weaker books. The scientific machinery, both that which leads to the conclusion and that which explains it, is a tad clumsy--H. G. Wells _Invisible_Man_ clumsy. It's easy to pardon Huxley for this; the science is merely a plot device. But it still seems like a weakness to me.
Since Huxley was born to write novels of ideas, his characters are (as usual) more types than individuals. Here they almost seem to have been an annoyance, as if regarded by their author as a necessary evil between him and the exploration of ideas. Stoyte strides on to the scene as a caricature and never can be taken seriously thereafter as a portrait of the homme moyen sensuel. His mistress is of a physical type that Huxley clearly loathed; her peculiar residue of childhood Catholicism fails to make her complex or wholly interesting. Huxley's endeavor at Steinbeck's game must not have pleased even himself: after one abortive appearance of an Okie named Bill, migrant farmworkers disappear into the generalization of their class.
Obispo is sharp, as a kind of unexpectedly suave Mephistopheles doing Stoyte's bidding in his laboratory. (Even in satire, Faust always loses.) But the only characters with any real depth are Pordage and Propter: Pordage, an urbane scholar but stunted human being; Propter, a non-denominational mystic and philosopher-saint of the orange groves. It is not presuming too much to interpret these two as competing sides of Huxley's personality. Their conversations and monologues make for the most interesting reading: this is a novel desperately trying to break into an essay. Huxley fits in many provocative ideas about God, time, language, literature, culture. It's a valuable record of where his thoughts were leading at this point in his career.
But had Huxley written an essay instead, there would have been no place for his brilliant rendition of a skeptical and dissolute earl's epigrammatic journal--just one example among many of Huxley's notable stylistic versatility.
I hope readers who enjoy any part of this book go on to Huxley's later fiction, like _Island_ or _The_Devils_of_Loudun_. And don't miss any of his later non-fiction, above all the summa of his spiritual investigations, _The_Perennial_Philosophy_.
Rated by buyers -
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan is a book set in America in the thirties. Jeremy Pordage, is an English scholard who was hired by millionaire Jo Stoyte to study and decipher the Hauberk papers which Stoyte acquired in England. Jo Stoyte, with his millions, his castle on the hill, his acquisitions, and his mistress, young Virginia, may very well have been Huxley's parody of William Randolph Hearst, who was very much alive when this book was written.
Stoyte had in his employ, a Dr. Obispo who was searching for a modern medical solution to immortality, also had the job of keeping Soyte alive as long as possible perhaps to one day eventually benefit form Obispo's findings. However, it is Jeremy Pordage who uncovers in his readings of the Hauberk papers, the secret to the indefinite extension of life, and that is through the eating of triturated carp entrails, as metal rings put through the tail of some carp in a pond by the great grandfather Hauberk, could be seen by the great grandson Hauberk.
The surprise ending in this book which occurs in the last five pages is nothing short of a Rod Serling, Twilight Zone type of Tour de Force. Money may buy a bed but not comfort, money may buy a house, but not a home, money may buy food, but not an appetite, and money may buy art, and furniture, but not taste, and this book shows that maybe too much money and too much time to live may not be the best thing after all.
Find other books like this one:
