A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title

At the heart of human experience lies an obsession with the nature of death. Religion, for most of history, has provided an explanation for human life and a vision of what comes after it. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such beliefs came under relentless pressure as new ideas--from psychiatry to evolution to communism--seemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands: humans could cease to be animals, defeat death, and become immortal.

In The Immortalization Commission, the...