Forever Young: A cultural history of longevity by Lucian Boia, Reaktion Books, £16.95/$25, ISBN 1861891547 Reviewed by James Kingsland
WHERE did we go wrong? Adam lived to the age of 930 and his grandson Methuselah to 969. The first generations of Chinese and Indian people are said to have lived for thousands of years. In our time, however, Jeanne Calment only clocked up a measly 122 years.
Historian Lucian Boia of the University of Bucharest, Romania, is as much concerned with the mythology of longevity as the reality. In Forever Young, he demonstrates how little our obsession with cheating death…
