The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever reprint Edition

“Fascinating and deeply disturbing. I love this book. - Simon Winchester (bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman)

David M. Friedman’s The Immortalists reads like riveting historical fiction but raises provocative questions about the shape of the future. - Ron Rosenbaum, best-selling author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler

“Fascinating, odd, troubling . . . and strangely poignant. In The Immortalists, David M. Friedman ably guides us through a thicket of science and politics.” - Los Angeles Times

“The history of two brilliant achievers going so off-track because of their intellectual hubris is quite compelling―and instructive to modern readers.” - USA Today

“Difficult to put down...this is the book to read.” - New York Times

His historic career as an aviator made Charles Lindbergh one of the most famous men of the twentieth century, the subject of best-selling biographies and a hit movie, as well as the inspiration for a dance step—the Lindy Hop—that he himself was too shy to try. But for all the attention lavished on Lindbergh, one story has remained untold until now: his macabre scientific collaboration with Dr. Alexis Carrel. This oddest of couples—one a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning surgeon turned social engineer, the other a failed dirt farmer turned hero of the skies—joined forces in 1930 driven by a shared and secret dream: to conquer death and attain immortality.

Part Frankenstein, part The Professor and the Madman, and all true, The Immortalists is the remarkable story of how two men of prodigious achievement and equally large character flaws challenged nature's oldest rule, with consequences—personal, professional, and political—that neither man anticipated.