Why We Age: What Science Is Discovering about the Body's Journey Through Life
Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
  • All the latest lore on aging, health, and nutrition
  • An entertaining introduction to the science of aging
  • This is the most amazing break through in science
  • Why We Age needs Companion Volume
  • Interesting
Why We Age: What Science Is Discovering about the Body's Journey Through Life
Steven N. Austad
Manufacturer: Wiley
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0471296465

Amazon.com

Before we know why we age, we need to know how we age. According to Steven Austad, we should blame the process on rusting and cooking. Oxygen causes our cells to rust, and glucose causes some of our tissues to take on the qualities of cooked meat. If we eat less food, we cook more slowly and we live longer. So, why do we age? Austad claims that we've evolved to have a certain reproductive usefulness, and after that the species doesn't need us anymore. What about all the "antiaging" equations modern science promises? Generally, the best they can do is prevent premature death. Sound harsh? Well, that's life, and Why We Age is one of the most entertaining and comprehensive guides on aging that you'll find.

Book Description

Why has the life span of the average American increased from 48 to 75 years in this century alone?

. . . If the body is a machine that simply wears out, why do some cells seem immortal?
. . . Is there an aging gene? And can we control it?
. . . Can antioxidants and hormone therapy actually slow the aging process and extend life?

Steven Austads compelling book investigates the history, the theories, and the personalities behind the quest to understand the nature of aging. Here is hard evidence from the front lines of research that science is finally closing in on the fundamental processes of human biology and life.

"Austads book can be read with pleasure and profit by any intelligent person with a smattering of biological knowledge." -Science

"In this clear, engrossing overview, Austad takes the sting out of a subject that will ultimately capture us all." -Publishers Weekly

"Why We Age is remarkably rigorous in its analysis and thorough scope. . . . A comprehensive examination of its topic." -Science Editors, Amazon.com

"The problem with long life is that one keeps getting older; heres an able and clearly written summary of the latest theories on why we age and what might be done to ameliorate the process." -Kirkus Reviews

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars All the latest lore on aging, health, and nutrition.......2002-08-08

This is a relaxed, somewhat witty book on aging and health by a zoologist with an emphasis on evolutionary biology. I particularly enjoyed Austed's use of statistical analysis in the beginning of the book in distinguishing popular notions about aging from what the raw data has to say. Austed uses statistics beautifully here. When Kant was trying (unsuccesfully) to formulate a science of metaphysics, he asked what other real life example of synthetic (additive) thought a priori was used by people. Math! Austed uses math to demonstrate apodaectically that what we generally refer to as extending human life is no more than altered longevity due largely to water purification, antibiotics, and less back-breaking labor rather than an actual delaying of the aging process. He also shows how our species tends to begin dying at about ten years of age according to the statistical dictate of mortality-doubling time. The limits of how old we may grow as determined by genetics is evidently about what it was back in Socrates' time, although these days longevity is greater. If cancer, according to professor Austed, were eliminated we could add a couple of more years to average longevity and likewise with heart disease; the two most prolific killers in the industrialized world. However, even if we unrealistically eliminated all disease, not only would our genes kill us somewhere around 90 years of age, but many of us would die from accidents in any event. Aging is determined by our genetic program and chance, not necessarily in that order, and the only possible hope we have for extending our limits of aging per se lies in some far off genetically engineered discovery. Presently, if you don't get flattened by a bus, your genes will get you, no matter how many vitamins you scarf down.

As for special diets, lizard's eyes (special vitamins), and magnets and crystals, these are largely placebo actuators. Unless you have special nutritional needs, a sensible diet, adequate sleep, moderate excercise, and being rich are about as much as you can do to determine your future health and longevity outside of avoiding firefights with religious fanatics and other testosterone dementias. Austed doesn't really address low stress as a longevity booster except perhaps to mention the nobles tended to live longer than peasants in pre-antibiotic days. Austed excecutes a revealing discourse on tales of how certain societies in far away mountain regions tend to live to older than normal ages by eating goat yogurt and smoking ginko leaves: these are folk tales and the author uses various examples of innoent charlatanry to demonstrate exactly how gullible people are when they very badly want to hear what they've already made up their minds to believe.

I was a bit unmoved by Austed's refutation of the cellular Hayflick limit's role in aging. While controlled cell division is certainly crucial to normal development and cancer mitigation, cells, like whole organisms, are also sitting ducks for unforeseen catastrophy. A non-regenerating cell is also an accident waiting to happen through injury, free radical damage, or deliterious mutation. In terms of generalized deterioration (aging) nonregenerating cells are eventually going to deteriorate to the point where they outnumber healthy nonregenerating cells, at which point, disfunction (aging) is certain to occur; but then what do I know, maybe this is just "what I want to believe."

Austed's observation that we seek a way to study certain whale species for their menopausal physiology (rare in the animal kingdom) and lower than human cancer rates is intriguing. How this would be accomplished outside of simple skin sample research is questionable however.

All in all a good book to have read for interpreting the almost daily media reports of miracle breakthroughs in aging and health. Austed's reliance on hard statistical analysis is very helpful in this context.

5 out of 5 stars An entertaining introduction to the science of aging.......2002-02-04

Why do we age? The simple answer is, there is no simple answer. The simplest "simple" answer is probably, we age because we live, and living wears our bodies out.

In order to live we breathe because our bodies use oxygen to convert food into energy. But in the process something called "oxidative damage" happens to our cells. In other words: we rust. Inevitably. The two other main reasons why bodies wear out are connected to glucose and "browning damage", and to self-repair mechanisms of our cells that fail to stop and lead to uncontrolled cell growth - what we call "cancer".

The three processes of rusting, browning and cancer are part of aging. They are "how" we age. But "why" do we age at all? Why don't we stay healthy for, say, 150 years and then simply drop dead? In very simple terms the reason is: aging is genetic. The genes do not care about the body after the body has served its purpose: to replicate the genes and ensure that they can replicate again. This is called the "selfish gene" theory, an expression coined by Richard Dawkins.

Gerontology, the study of aging, is a field of science in rapid growth. I do not claim to be a specialist; therefore I do not want to go into much detail here. Steven Austad's book explains very well "what science is discovering about the body's journey through life". He ends his book with a chapter of particular interest for women ("Reproductive Aging, Menopause, and Health"), and a chapter on our hopes of how to make the best of our ultimate genetic fate ("Slowing Aging and Extending Life: Remedies and Expectations").

Apart from Austad's humor - it can be both droll and dry - I have particularly enjoyed his short portraits of scientists in the field of gerontology and evolutionary biology, such as the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, the immunologist Peter Medawar, the American scientist Raymond Pearl (who in 1938 produced the first paper analyzing the extent to which smoking reduced life expectancy, but also was of the opinion that people above 50 should forfeit their right to vote, because they would have grown too foolish), the German physiologist Max Rubner, the gerontologist Alex Comfort (who discovered the joy - and profitability - of sex), the biologist John Maynard Smith, and the two-time Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling.

Austad's cameo of Max Rubner is my favorite because of its psychological insight into the downside of dedication and narrow focus: "The first scientist to investigate the rate-of-living idea in any rigorous fashion was the German physiologist Max Rubner. Rubner could make people very uncomfortable with his Teutonic bluntness. He was noted for his long silences, punctuated with outbursts of aggressively sarcastic humor. But he was also an obsessively precise investigator of the energy contained in food and the use of that energy by animals. Like obsessives everywhere, he felt that the significance of his obsession was underappreciated by others."

5 out of 5 stars This is the most amazing break through in science.......2002-01-21

Wow, I am impressed. I never expected this to be a good book when I saw it on my collage reading list. This turned out not only to be scientific jargon, but keeps the reader facinated with the authors great personality which comes through in the writing.

IF YOU BUY ONE BOOK EVER BUY THIS BOOK, AND IF YOU BUY ANOTHER, BUY THIS ONE AGAIN!

3 out of 5 stars Why We Age needs Companion Volume.......2002-01-02

After reading Austad's book, you should read THE IMMORTALIST MANIFESTO: STAY YOUNG & SAVE THE WORLD by Elixxir. It complements Austad's book..... Find out why Harvard's philosophy professor Cornel West calls the author FIRST RATE! ORIGINAL...RAZOR-SHARP.

The Immortalist Manifesto argues persuasively that the anti-aging breakthroughs will not necessarily come in time for you and me. Unless there is an Immortalist movement which pushes society into a Manhattan Project or Apollo Program to conquer Old Age and Death. If this book does not stir us into action, nothing will. It is to Immortalism what The Communist Manifesto was to Socialism.

The Immortalist Manifesto minces no words to remind us that "do-it-yourselfism" is not enough if your goal is to conquer Old Age. Just as you alone can never make it to the moon. Reading Austad won't hurt. But reading THE IMMORTALIST MANIFESTO just might save your life!

3 out of 5 stars Interesting.......2001-02-02

This book presents a thoroughly readable introduction to the science of aging, not just human aging, but aging among all animals. The author begins by pointing out that all claims for pockets of extraordinarily aged people in various corners of the world have always lacked documentation or other substantiation. He states that there is a limit to human longevity that has remained constant even as life expectancies have risen with improved health care and living conditions.

Austad's somewhat simplistic writing style seems geared towards readers of self-help bestsellers at times, and occasionally his analogies lack clarity. Early in the text he defines the beginning of aging as the time when the probability of death is at its minimum, which seems to be about age 11 in humans. While this may be the standard measure for the science of aging (?), Austad never compares this to ordinary people's measures. For instance, many lay people distinguish between aging and longevity. They accept that there is a limit to life but within that limit, they want to have the highest quality of life possible right up until the end. Such people might define aging as a decline in life quality due to pain or illness, and loss of balance, strength, or memory. Certainly, quality of life does not start to decline at age 11. Later in the book as Austad examines ways that people might lengthen their lives, he still never takes up the issue of quality of life. Austad argues that some of the things that people do to try to make themselves healthier (exercise, vitamins) have not been shown to increase longevity but he seems to overlook the fact that they might increase the quality of life so they still might be worthwhile.

Despite these weaknesses, the book is still a very good introduction to the science of aging. It summarizes much current research about aging in language that is accessible by anyone.
The Intertidal Wilderness: A Photographic Journey through Pacific Coast Tidepools, Revised Edition
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • Exquisite
The Intertidal Wilderness: A Photographic Journey through Pacific Coast Tidepools, Revised Edition
Anne Wertheim Rosenfeld
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Book Description

The Intertidal Wilderness is a stunning photographic exploration of the tidepools of the Pacific coast, from Baja California to as far north as southeast Alaska. These lush photographs capture in striking color the enormous variety of life and biological detail in the intertidal zone along one of the world's most spectacular coastlines. The interpretative text and captions describe telltale signs of ecological relationships and processes, helping the seashore explorer to appreciate ecological interactions and their consequences. The text delves into the roles of competition, predation, reproduction, natural variation in space and time, and color that characterize this vibrant ecosystem.
This revised edition has been updated throughout, incorporating new scientific information, new photographs, and a new chapter discussing the recent human impact on this threatened environment. Fusing art and science, The Intertidal Wilderness conveys the fragility, complexity, and interdependence of the plants and animals living at the interface of land and sea.
The Intertidal Wilderness vividly animates the surprisingly delicate beauty of the often violent intertidal zone, which daily withstands pounding waves at high tides as well as desiccation and exposure at low tides. With revealing photographs, engaging text, and a solid foundation in marine biology, this book will capture the imagination of the casual seashore visitor as well as the dedicated enthusiast.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Exquisite.......2004-02-16

The photographs alone make this volume an enormous pleasure.
Biology: The Journey Through Life
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    Biology: The Journey Through Life
    Arms
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    ProductGroup: Book
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    Birth As a Healing Experience: The Emotional Journey of Pregnancy Through Postpartum (Haworth Innovations in Feminist Studies)
    Average customer rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
    • Emotions about our past influence our birth experiences
    • Put my copy in the trash please.
    Birth As a Healing Experience: The Emotional Journey of Pregnancy Through Postpartum (Haworth Innovations in Feminist Studies)
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    ASIN: 078900576X

    Book Description

    Birth as a Healing Experience: The Emotional Journey of Pregnancy Through Postpartum emphasizes and examines the emotional aspects of pregnancy and postpartum, presenting these periods as important opportunities for a woman's growth and healing from previous traumatic births or pregnancy losses. Midwives, childbirth educators, pregnant and postpartum women, women of childbearing age, and men will find that this book is unlike most others on pregnancy because it focuses on the healing potential in pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum rather than on the medical aspects. Women's stories illustrate how individuals deal with past experiences of grief and loss during pregnancy in a therapeutic setting.

    Through Birth as a Healing Experience, you will discover a new model of childbirth preparation that empowers women and their partners for a fulfilling childbirth experience. You will also find that this essential book contains important information on supporting women during the postpartum period so you can provide the best services to your clients throughout the childbearing experience.

    Addressing the importance of a woman's emotional well-being during the pregnancy and postpartum periods, the detailed case studies in this informative book will help you understand and learn from each topic. Birth as a Healing Experience offers you insightful discussions about:

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    the effects of pregnancy and childbirth on the psychological development of women

    the importance of healing from past birth traumas and/or the early death of a mother to have a satisfying pregnancy and motherhood experience

    From this vital guide, you will understand how such issues as a previous traumatic birth, miscarriage, or your own early mother loss can have an effect on your pregnancy and postpartum periods. Birth as a Healing Experience emphasizes honoring the childbirth experience and focuses on the power of women supporting women during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. From this intelligent book, you will find unique stories that will enhance the childbearing experience for you and your clients.

    Customer Reviews:

    4 out of 5 stars Emotions about our past influence our birth experiences.......2007-10-04

    The author has provided expectant women with a window into their own thoughts as well as suggestions for how to help them enjoy their birth experience and weave it into their emotions as a positive experience. By allowing such a momentous occasion such as birth to awaken our inner thoughts, dreams and intense emotions about our past (and sometimes our relationships with our own mothers!), we are taken to a level where we can be renewed, in a sense. This book is straight-forward and uses examples to inspire. Many women go into late pregnancy with fear...this book helps them wade through that fear to the cause and helps them experience birth as an empowering (and sometimes forgiving) experience.

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    Botanic man: A journey through evolution with David Bellamy
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      Botanic man: A journey through evolution with David Bellamy
      David J Bellamy
      Manufacturer: Hamlyn
      ProductGroup: Book
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      LIFE'S JOURNEY THROUGH TIME: AN APPROACH TO SOME PROBLEMS OF HUMAN BIOLOGY.
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        LIFE'S JOURNEY THROUGH TIME: AN APPROACH TO SOME PROBLEMS OF HUMAN BIOLOGY.

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        Repair and Renewal: Journey Through the Mind and Body
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          Time-Life Books
          Manufacturer: Time-Life Books
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          Binding: Hardcover

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          Biology: The Journey Through Life
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            Body Works: A 3d Journey Through the Human Anatomy With Workbook
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              Self-Organized Criticality in Earth Systems
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                Stefan Hergarten
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                Self-organized criticality (SOC) has become a magic word in various scientific disciplines; it provides a framework for understanding complexity and scale invariance in systems showing irregular fluctuations. In the first 10 years after Per Bak and his co-workers presented their seminal idea, more than 2000 papers on this topic appeared. Seismology has been a field in earth sciences where the SOC concept has already deepened the understanding, but there seem to be much more examples in earth sciences where applying the SOC concept may be fruitful. After introducing the reader into the basics of fractals, chaos and SOC, the book presents established and new applications of SOC in earth sciences, namely earthquakes, forest fires, landslides and drainage networks.

                Handbook on the Physics and Chemistry of Rare Earths : Lanthanides/Actinides: Physics - I (Handbook on the Physics and Chemistry of Rare Earths)
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                  Handbook on the Physics and Chemistry of Rare Earths : Lanthanides/Actinides: Physics - I (Handbook on the Physics and Chemistry of Rare Earths)

                  Manufacturer: North Holland
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                  Binding: Hardcover

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                  This volume of the Handbook is the first of a three volume set of reviews devoted to the interrelationships, similarities, differences and contrasts of the lanthanide and actinide series of elements. In order to comprehensively cover this large field two leading scientists, G.H. Lander and G.R. Choppin, were invited to be guest editors for this special set of volumes. Together, the four editors carefully and critically chose the various topics and invited the appropriate experts to write reviews keeping in mind that the emphasis was to be on the interrelationships of the lanthanides and actinides. The volume contains eight chapters concerned with some of the physical aspects of the lanthanide and actinide series. The first three chapters are theoretical in nature and the last five are more heavily oriented towards experimental studies.
                  Handbook on the Physics and Chemistry of Rare Earths : Lanthanides/Actinides: Physics - I (Handbook on the Physics and Chemistry of Rare Earths)
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                    ProductGroup: Book
                    Binding: Hardcover
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                    The RUM DIARY: A LONG LOST NOVEL
                    Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
                    • The Rum Diary
                    • Best book ever
                    • Great book
                    • hunter s. doesn't disappoint
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                    The RUM DIARY: A LONG LOST NOVEL
                    Hunter S. Thompson
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                    "Disgusting as he usually was," Hunter Thompson writes in this, his 1959 novel, "on rare occasions he showed flashes of a stagnant intelligence. But his brain was so rotted with drink and dissolute living that whenever he put it to work it behaved like an old engine that had gone haywire from being dipped in lard." Surprise! Thompson isn't writing about himself, but one of the other, older, aimlessly carousing newspapermen in Puerto Rico, a guy called Moberg whose chief achievement is the ability to find his car after a night's drinking because it stinks so much. (I can smell it for blocks, he boasts.) The autobiographical hero, Paul Kemp, is 30, trapped in a dead-end job (Thompson wound up writing for a bowling magazine), and feeling as if his big-time writer dreams, soaked in Fitzgerald and Hemingway, are evaporating as rapidly as the rum in his fist.

                    In fact, Thompson was only 22 when he wrote The Rum Diary, but his fear of winding up like Moberg was well founded. What saved him was the fantastic conflagration of the 1960s, a fiery wind on which the reptilian wings of his prose style could catch and soar to the cackling heights of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Puerto Rico in 1959 doesn't have bad craziness enough to offer Thompson--just a routine drunken-reporter stomping by local cops and a riot over Kemp's friend's temptress girlfriend, a scantily imagined Smith College alumna who likes to strip nude on beaches and in nightclubs to taunt men.

                    Thompson's prose style only intermittently takes tentative flight--compare the stomping scenes in this book with his breakthrough, Hell's Angels--but it's interesting to see him so nakedly reveal his sensitive innards, before the celebrated clownish carapace grew in. It's also interesting to see how he improved this full version of the novel from the more raw (and racist) excerpts found in the 1990 collection Songs of the Doomed (available on audiocassette, partly narrated by Thompson). --Tim Appelo

                    Book Description

                    The Rum Diary was begun in 1959 by then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson. It was his first novel, and he told his friend, the author William Kennedy, that The Rum Diary would "in a twisted way...do for San Juan what Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises did for Paris." In Paul Kemp, the novel's hero, there are echoes of the young Thompson, who was himself honing his wildly musical writing style as one of the "ill-tempered wandering rabble" on staff at the San Juan Daily News at the time. "I shared a dark suspicion," Kemp says, "that the life we were leading was a lost cause, we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles -- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other -- that kept me going."

                    The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery & violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. "It was a gold rush," says the author. "There were naked people everywhere and we all had credit."

                    Puerto Rico was an unspoiled tropical paradise in those years -- before Castro, before JFK, before civil rights & moonwalks & flower power & Vietnam & protests & even before drugs -- but the San Juan Daily News was a vortex & a snakepit of all the corrupt new schemes & plots & greedmongers who swarmed in. Paul Kemp, The Rum Diary's narrator, speaks for the unfocused angst of those times: "In a sense I was one of them -- more competent than some and more stable than others -- and in the years that carried that ragged banner I was seldom unemployed. Sometimes I worked for three newspapers at once. I wrote ad copy for new casinos and bowling alleys, I was a consultant for the cockfighting syndicate, an utterly corrupt high-end restaurant critic, a yachting photographer and a routine victim of police brutality. It was a greedy life and I was good at it. I made some interesting friends, had enough money to get around, and learned a lot about the world that I could never have learned in any other way."

                    Customer Reviews:

                    5 out of 5 stars The Rum Diary.......2007-09-24

                    Thompson's best work for beginners as well as a favorite for seasoned fans. Written more like a screenplay than any of his other works, The Rum Diary takes you on the journey of a degenerate journalist's time as a sports writer for an English rag in San Juan. From the interesting characters to the usual Thompson antics this book will not disappoint. The length lends itself to consumption of an afternoon, so if you are easily engulfed with storylines make sure you have the time. This is one of the most heavily used books in my Thompson collection as it is a great story that never seems to grow old. I can't wait to see what happens when the movie starts filming.

                    5 out of 5 stars Best book ever.......2007-08-14

                    This is honestly the most enjoyable book I've ever read. Hunter S. Thompson is absolutely brilliant. You would have no idea that this was his first novel. I kept having to limit what I read in a day so that I could read it longer. I would recommend this book to anyone (and have!)

                    5 out of 5 stars Great book.......2007-08-03

                    This little book was such a find. It is one that once you stop you cant put down. A good read and interesting topic.

                    5 out of 5 stars hunter s. doesn't disappoint.......2007-07-26

                    this is a really good book. the pace is really quick, yet there is enough dialogue to connect you with the characters and settings. it is a real fun book to read.

                    5 out of 5 stars Quality ish..........2007-06-06

                    I just finished this and it is a real hoot. I have never read any of his other works and intend to. I recommend this book for anyone who wants a laugh and enjoys reading about people who live at the bottom of the bottle. Enjoy!
                    The Rum Diary: The Long Lost Novel
                    Average customer rating: Not rated
                      The Rum Diary: The Long Lost Novel
                      Hunter S. Thompson
                      Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
                      ProductGroup: Book
                      Binding: Hardcover
                      ASIN: B000OLZO74

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