Future of Immortality

by Robert Jay Lifton

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465025978
• ISBN13: 9780465025978
• Release Date: March 1987
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 398 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Horrors of the Twentieth Century

This book is a collection of essays dealing with man's struggle with self-annihilation in the twentieth century. The topics dealt with include nuclearism and nuclear war, the Holocaust, cults, suicide, and the Vietnam War. The author is concerned with how the "survivor" of such an attrocity, either as the persecuted or the persecutor (or somewhere in between), is able to link up with their former self and visualize a meaningful existence afterwards. The author understands immortality to be that sense of connectedness with others, with history, and with the great chain of being, that all individuals experience. And, the author questions how there can remain a sense of immortality given some of the horrors that have occurred and continue to occur (in the form of nuclear weapons). The author takes a definite anti-nuclear stance in the book, and he repeatedly stresses the importance of avoiding falling into the illusion that stockpiling nuclear weapons is the only way out of our current nuclear dilemma. The author also includes essays on the Holocaust, in particular on the Nazi doctors who contributed at Auschwitz. Here the author explains how these doctors came to confuse the roles of healing and killing, a slippery slope which is all too easy to slide down. In addition, the author discusses those Vietnam veterans who came home from the war with a profound sense of futility. Rather than seeing the war as meaningful, they came to feel that they were fighting in a war with no real purpose. The author discusses his sessions with various veterans and how they dealt with their ambivalent emotions towards the war.