Tundraco's Daily Living Guide to Book Reviews

The Book of Ages The Ever Changing Life Cycles of Man Revealed by the Famous (And Infamous) Throughout History By Desmond Morris Viking Press (1984)

Reviewed by Israel Drazin - May 5, 2010

Desmond Morris is able to present facts about various subjects, such as symbols or ancient practices or animal behavior, and make them interesting. In this book, he focuses on numbers related to people, in history and now, from 0, the year of a baby, the only age that is never spoken of in years, to 118, the oldest proven age that a person, a Japanese man, lived. He was still alive in 1983 when Morris wrote his book.

Morris offers his readers two interesting pages of information about every number. He tells about geniuses, such as John Stuart Mill, an English boy, who started to study Greek at age 3 and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who was playing the harpsichord and memorizing musical passages after hearing them once at the same age. He tells us that the great Greek philosopher Aristotle maintained that 37 is the ideal age for a man to marry. This was how old Richard Burton was when he became sexually involved with Elizabeth Taylor.

Morris includes such things as the countries that have a life expectancy for each number. He notes that in the ancient Roman Empire, the life expectancy was only 26, while in Chad in Africa in 1983 the figure was 29 for males. He lists achievements at each age, such as the English philosopher Bertrand Russell who was still very active in international peace drives at age 94. He gives the age of death of famous people such as the actress Mae West who died at age 88 and Marilyn Monroe who died when she was 36, the same age that tradition gives for the death of Jesus.

All in all, this is a fun book to skim through and an excellent reference book if a person wants to find something to say about a specific number.

Dr. Israel Drazin is the author of fifteen books, including a series of five volumes on the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible, which he co-authors with Rabbi Dr. Stanley M. Wagner, and a series of four books on the twelfth century philosopher Moses Maimonides, the latest being Maimonides: Reason Above All, published by Gefen Publishing House, www.gefenpublishing.com. The Orthodox Union (OU) publishes daily samples of the Targum books on www.ouradio.org

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