Death/Sex - Hardcover

Tyler Volk; Dorion Sagan

3.79

62 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 160358143X ISBN 13: 9781603581431

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2009

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On DEATH . . . What is shared by spawning Pacific salmon, towering trees, and suicidal bacteria? In his lucid and concise exploration of how and why things die, Tyler Volk explains the intriguing ways creatures-including ourselves-use death to actually enhance life. Death is not simply the end of the living, though even in that aspect the Grim Reaper has long been essential to natural selection. Indeed, the exquisite schemes and styles of death that have emerged from evolution have been essential to the great story from life's beginnings in tiny bacteria nearly four thousand million years ago to ancient human rituals surrounding death and continuing to the existential concerns of human culture and consciousness today. Volk weaves together autobiography, biology, Earth history, and results of fascinating studies that show how thoughts of our own mortality affect our everyday lives, to prove how an understanding of what some have called the ultimate taboo can enrich the celebration of life. . . . and SEX In Sex, Dorion Sagan takes a delightful, irreverent, and informative romp through the science, philosophy, and literature of humanity's most obsessive subject. Have you ever wondered what the anatomy and promiscuous behaviors of chimpanzees and the sexual bullying of gorillas tell us about ourselves? Why we lost our hair? What amoebas have to do with desire? Linking evolutionary biology to salacious readings of the lives and thoughts of such notables as the Marquis de Sade and Simone de Beauvoir, and discussing works as varied as The Story of O and Silence of the Lambs, Sex touches on a potpourri of interrelated topics ranging from animal genitalia to sperm competition, the difference between nakedness and nudity, jealousy's status as an aphrodisiac and the origins of language, Casanova and music, ovulation and clothes, mother-in-law jokes and alpha females, love and loneliness. A brief, wonderfully entertaining, highly literate foray into the origins and evolution of sex. Two books in one cover, Death & Sex unravel and answer some of life's most fundamental questions.

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Review:

New Scientist-
What could be more alluring than a book about sex? How about a book about sex that, when flipped over, is also a book about death? In this two-for-one, biologist Tyler Volk and writer Dorion Sagan tackle two of the most important processes in the human experience. They touch on their respective subjects' fundamental importance to human history, while the book's format shows how the two are interconnected.

In Death, Volk investigates the biology of death across species and revisits death rituals throughout human history. Surprisingly, Volk's presentation serves as a reassuring affirmation of life, painting death as just another stage in an ever-repeating evolutionary cycle. In Sex, Sagan revels in covering what is clearly his favourite subject in a series of digressions, with playful prose that slips effortlessly from the complications of fertilisation to the widespread misconceptions relating to Marquis de Sade's lascivious nature.

In this single compact volume, the two subjects are presented with many delightful touches and details that put our carnal desire and our mortality into surprising perspective.

"Dorion Sagan muses ruthlessly on the topic of sex and the result is as twisted and tangled as a set of bed sheets. Hyena sex, cycad sex, lots of primate sex, and even a digression on why the Marquis de Sade was not such a bad guy: Sagan takes pleasure in revealing it all. He even makes bacterial sex sound fun. Tyler Volk succeeds in translating everything of the natural world with generous poetic details, from tree-filled landscapes to star systems, as one or another version of death. We humans are by-products of carbon dioxide from dead photosynthesizers, yet Volk manages to make even this a fact well worth celebrating."--Betsey Dyer, Professor of Biology, Wheaton College, author of A Field Guide to Bacteria

"Dorion Sagan and Tyler Volk show us sex is optional and death is necessary, turning the tables on our lusts and fears, our origins and endings, in a surprisingly enticing way."--Adam Daniel Stulberg, Poetic Interconnections

"I happen to be a book buyer by profession. It is a rare instance when I open up a package of fresh publisher samples that a book brings my day to a halt due to its beauty, let alone its subject. Death & Sex is such a book. Its look and texture are as tempting and forbidding as its topics. This book begs to be given a design award."--Garth Kobal

"Dorion Sagan's Sex is truly fabulous. The flow of writing and joy in reading is not a surprise. Nor are the many fascinating sex factoids which demand an underline in this otherwise mostly 'feets-up' read. But the feets-up ease of Sagan's writing is, at first, misleading. Not unlike a Canterbury tale, we ease into a story only to be awakened--ah, to be enlightened about the cannibalistic origins of sex (nope, no Apple Tree) by the merging properties of Hannibal Lecter, raccoons, and quiet amoebas. Well known as a science writer, Dorion Sagan, shows, once again, that he is far more than that. Sagan is post- post-modern ... a new tack for deep thought, a funny philosopher. When you pick up Sex, you will meet a true fabulist."--Lois Brynes, President, Deep-Time Associates

"Death and Sex--really two books in one--is not a lurid tale of necrophilia. In it quotidian simplicities are dissolved in the acid of evolutionary theory. --Denis Noble, Professor Emeritus of Physiology, Oxford University, Fellow of the Royal Society, and author of The Music of Life

"Sex is the koan we can't stop from coming. Sagan shows us just how deep the riddle of sex goes--pulsing through the world from the Marquis de Sade's plays right down to the bacteria that make up our cells. This slim book allows us to be voyeurs and exhibitionists: Read about the sex lives of others and the other lives of sex to examine yourself. Whether you end up resonating more readily with the puritanical tendencies of the orangutans or with the orgiastic culture of the bonobo chimps, Dorion Sagan's Sex will provide a hilarious, thoughtful, and unforgettable time. It's more fun than my day job." --Conner Habib, adult-film actor and writer

"A boisterous Siamese twin of a book which looks at the two sides of the same molecular process: that of sex, and that of death, within the framework of life almost eternal. Enjoy, and know you are part of it." --Crispin Tickell, Director of the Policy Foresight Programme, Oxford University, former Warden of Green College, Oxford University, and former British Ambassador to the United Nations

About the Author:

Dorion Sagan is author of numerous articles and twenty-three books translated into eleven languages, including Notes from the Holocene: A Brief History of the Future and Into the Cool, coauthored with Eric D. Schneider. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Wired, The Skeptical Inquirer, Pabular, Smithsonian, The Ecologist, Co-Evolution Quarterly, The Times Higher Education, Omni, Natural History, The Sciences, Cabinet, and Tricycle. He edited Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel, a 2012 collection of writings addressing Margulis's life and work. Tyler Volk is Science Director for Environmental Studies and Professor of Biology at New York University. Recipient of the NYU All-University Distinguished Teaching Award, Volk lectures and travels widely, communicates his ideas in a variety of media, plays lead guitar for the all-scientist rock band The Amygdaloids, and is an avid outdoorsman. Volk's previous books include CO2 Rising: The World's Greatest Environmental Challenge; Metapatterns Across Space, Time, and Mind; and Gaia's Body: Toward a Physiology of Earth.

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