I really wanted to like this one more than I did. After all, it’s a book about (as the subtitle says) how and why we age, and as I’ll be fifty at the end of June it’s a topic that doesn’t exactly weigh on my mind, but does make me curious.
Run-on sentence, hoy.
Armstrong’s book looks at a great many of the physical processes behind aging (the way our cells tick down moment by moment until they die), the ways people have tried to avoid aging (the Breatharians make an appearance and I just can’t with that particular group), the role inflammation may play in aging (more extensive than might have been believed), and other questions about ‘normal’ aging: what is it, how does it happen, how can we stop it.
At one point, I heard Jeff Goldblum’s version of Dr. Ian Malcom in my head: Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.
Which sounds much more negative than I intended it to, but here we are. I wanted to like this one more than I did, after all.
Early in the book, Armstrong notes “The very real progress in teasing out and tinkering with the roots of age-related disease has been ignored[.]” And I think I would have liked the book better if it were looking at that progress, rather than on ways to achieve immortality.
Armstrong’s writing is clear and easy for a layperson to understand; she goes to primary sources as much as possible and interviewed many people for the text. I lost interest about halfway through, but someone not me might find it an enjoyable read all the way through.
I don’t want to live forever; I never have. My lifespan is what it is, my cells ticking down as they’re programmed to, my telomeres doing their jobs. But I’d like to be healthy right up until the last one ticks its last tick and shuts up shop forever.
(I received Borrowed Time as an ARC from Netgalley.com. No funds were exchanged for this review.)