 |
|
Title: Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
ISBN: 0452286670
Author:
Ray Kurzweil
Terry Grossman
Publicate Date: 2005-09-27
Publish: 2005-09-27
List Price: $17.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
 |
|
|
|
|
Amazon Lowest New Price: $8.79
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $7.25
Amazon Merchant Price: $11.56
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Customer Review: |
|
1: Starter Book for the rest of your life
I heard about this book on NPR a few years ago and decided to buy it. I enjoyed the book so much I bought 10 more paperbacks to give to friends and family. What is most interesting about this book and the genre of books I have since purchased is the life extension concept and how early we are, medically speaking, in understanding this important medical field.
The author explains in non-technical ways how proper nutrients, mineral, vitamins, and fatty acids interact with peoples genetic code to help promote better health. There is some self-diagnosing and treatments that the author explains using clinical trials and other studies as support for his conclusions.
Overall, the author is very convincing and intreprets extremely well the studies and findings into a wealth of information for you and me to use as a life extension medical book. The book is now over 4 years old and other books have come out supporting this authors conclusions and recommendations.
If you want to be healther, live longer, and train yourself on what proper eating and supplements augmentation can do, read this book.
I've determined that the word "dieting" is not your friend, however if you learn to eat the proper foods and avoid the foods that cause your body the most problems like inflamation, diabetes, and arthritus then you'll never diet again, ever. Even overweight people can live to be 100 hundred years old. Google it. It's all about the proper nutrition and NOT medicine!!!
|
2: Hard science, and philosphically engaging...
I actually enjoyed this quite a bit.
There is a Three Bridge system to health that is suggested. Current preventative medicine (supplementation, and alternative, among others), new and soon to come drugs, and future nanotechnology and genetic engineering, respectively.
Throughout the book there are small breaks in the text where ideas for reaching these three bridges are discussed. Some of it seems very schifi-ish but, if you're like me you will enjoy the read anyways (food belts, tissue replacement, nanotechnology enhanced bone repair, nanobot blood cells, etc.).
The main downside to the book was it's length (I tend to be a slow reader) and extensive discussion of facts and studies and lots of numbers. Often times the things have no relevance to my current life situation. Being a young, fit and healthy man made the paragraphs on menopause rather dry and boring.
My favorite part of the book was the discussions it inspired. Many bioethical topics which I could bring up with friends and coworkers which resulted in very stimulating conversations. Along with that I really enjoyed the last two chapters; exercise and stress reduction. Especially towards the end of the book things get more philosophical as he discusses how important it is to your health to have meaning in your life.
I think the overall goal of the book is great. That being, to inspire the reader to better themselves. Very Buddhist.
I also enjoyed the occasional hint of humor.
|
3: Good guide to living forever--BUT boy, is it depressing!
I am reading Ray's Singularity book, where he makes a convincing case that tech is moving forward so incredibly fast that there's a good chance that if you can only make it to 2020 still alive & functioning, you might live a much longer life than we do now, and in a much better state of health.
I know Ray eats lots of health pills and stuff, and wanted to get his recommendations for what exactly to do to actually live to 2020 (when I will be 80). The book does a good job of methodically working through all aspects of a healthy life, from exercise and stress to diet, with a heavy emphasis on diet. It is certainly "actionable" since he tells you what you need to do.
Problem is, what you need to do is give up anything you've ever liked to eat in your life, and spend the rest of your life (or until 2020) eating stuff that has no flavor, no taste, no fun, no jazz. Give up sweets, simple starches like potatoes, macaroni, spaghetti, bread other than whole-wheat with pebbles in it, ice cream and milk and all other dairy products, and every form of meat except salmon -- not even tuna and swordfish because they have high mercury levels. No gravies or sauces, no mayo, only olive oil--and only certain specific expensive olive oils, too.
Instead you are to revert to your hunter-gatherer ancestral dietary load of raw everything, fatless everything, little meat, little sweet, little tasty -- if it's tasteless, dry, chewy, and flavorless, then good. If you find yourself smiling after you take a bite--then spit it out, it's killing you!
Kiss off mealtime and snacktime as joyful enterprises in your life. Eating is something you will from now on do for fuel only, not for pleasure.
To be fair, Ray and his partner make two points: First, if you really do try to reduce yourself to this level of eating, after a while you will get somewhat used to it -- it's supposedly true that, for example, if you eat a lot of sweets you become addicted to sweet tastes, whereas if you forgo sweets, after a while your sweet tooth diminishes. So it's not torture forever--just for the months (or years?) it will take your body and your taste buds to adjust. I suppose that might have some truth to it. God knows if I have chocolate milk for breakfast (so shoot me!), my sweet tooth for the rest of that day becomes more like a sweet fang.
Second, he says that by the time we reach 2020, medical technology breakthroughs will make it likely that we'll be able to go back to abusing our digestive tracts somewhat, since medicine will be able to offset or compensate for our poor choices and we'll have sin without guilt once again. Ah, Eden!
But for now, I just get depressed every time I look in the fridge, or walk the aisles of the grocery store, knowing that every single thing that catches my eye will kill me outright, or at least before I reach 2020. It will be really, really annoying if I am the last man to die from 20th century body malfunctions! But if I had that much discipline and self control, I'd be a much better person than I have ever been. And how likely is that?
|
4: Great health advice, but the premise assumes a future that should be questioned
I am impressed by the number and quality of customer reviews this book has spawned, many with which I largely agree. To wit:
- This book is chock full of good health and nutritional advice backed by solid research
- It starts to get dicey when it talks about new drugs, technologies, and treatments that are as of yet unproven.
In general, buy it for the great health advice, and leave it at that.
Beyond what is written on the page, there is another underlying thread that I must say I found troubling. I first sensed it when Ray described his own health regimen. He talked about going to a clinic once a week where he gets hooked up to IVs for several hours to receive supplements. Yikes, Ray, that sounds just a little obsessive to me. You get the feeling that Ray doesn't do anything half way, and that's probably why he has been so successful in life, but it seems very narcissistic. And the number of pills these guys must take is enormous, and expensive. Have you priced something as prosaic as, say, CoQ-10 lately? This living-forever business is not cheap.
Looking at the bigger picture, I can't help but feel that the authors are blithely ignoring the elephant in the room: living forever sounds great, but the consequences for the world as we know it are profound and unknown. Would we start handing out ration tickets for baby production? Do we understand the psychological implications for a population that is 1,000 years old? I don't think we can even begin to imagine what the world would be like, but I don't think too many people alive today would like it very much.
I'm sure Terry and Ray would say that that is a whole different discussion; that they want to solve the whole pesky dying thing first, then we'll worry about the consequences. But those nagging questions about the desirability of their purported end-game prevent me from recommending this book more highly.
If you don't think too hard about their ultimate goal, and use their advice to make your time on this earth more productive and pleasant, you'll do just fine.
|
5: Take your prescribed skepticism together with this book and swallow
The greatest benefit of this book is that it really forces you to think about all aspects of your body, as well as some of your mind. You learn once and for all--often in excruciating detail--that we very much are what we eat. Likewise, on the mental divide, we learn that we become what we think.
There are several sections defined as "bridges" (Scientology antagonists, flee!)--obviously more from the pen of Mr. Kurzweil than Mr. Grossman, and more typical of the Futurist side of him that we have come to meet in books like "The Age of Spiritual Machines"--that sometimes border on the ridiculous. But it's always entertaining, in good spirit, and again, it makes you think. So many times during our recorded history has science fiction crossed over into real life, that we should be very careful dismissing anything simply based on what we personally consider ludicrous today.
Even so, take everything in this book (especially the dosages of food, nutrients, drugs, etc) together with a healthy dose of skepticism--and don't forget to consult your physician before you swallow.
|
|
|
|
|
