Death & Sex Kindle Edition

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.

"In a mere 90 pages, Tyler Volk's book Death brilliantly depicts the biology and psychology of its subject, putting death in proper perspective as an integral component of the life cycle. I've read many insightful books about death, but if I were to recommend one book to help someone come to terms with death, this would be it."--Jeff Greenberg, Director of the Social Psychology Program, Unversity of Arizona

"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

"In just 100 pages, everything you really need to know about sex: Why? When? Where? With whom? Dorion Sagan slides effortlessly from seductive prose to bringing the reader sharp up against one astonishing scientific discovery after another."--Denis Noble, Professor Emeritus of Physiology, Oxford University, Fellow of the Royal Society, and author of The Music of Life

"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

"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

"What delicious writing and reading! I love this wise and funny big-little book."--Erica Jong, iconic author of numerous bestselling works of fiction, poetry and essays

"This champagne cocktail of exploration and insight, not to forget the murkier passions of lust, or the despondency that comes from unrequited love, abandonment, or loss--what an inspired confection of two immensities, sex and death. I genuinely can't recall reading a more inspiring or entertaining book in years!"--Frank Ryan, MD, author of Virolution and Darwin's Blind Spot

"While New Orleans indeed boasts a streetcar named 'Desire, ' returning in the other direction, as eventually it must, it runs, appropriately enough, to 'Cemetery, ' circulating, like some great cosmic wheel of life and death, endlessly between the two. Eschewing the taboos that surround discussion of both Sex and Death, and transgressing the disciplinary boundaries between philosophical metaphysics and biochemistry, this volume manages to be, at once, both playfully iconoclastic, and technically informative. Indeed it exhibits the very rare capacity to popularize, without 'selling out' or oversimplifying an intellectually challenging analysis of various physiological, animal, social and metaphysical manifestations and implications of this cosmic wheel of life and death. Where else is one going to experience such from chance encounters with de Sade, Monty Python, Basho and Poincare?" --Simon Glynn, Professor of Philosophy, Florida Atlantic University