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The Man Who Grew Young: PreviewAdam Taylor is, in a sense, a contemporary of ours. He lives in California, works on a newspaper, reads books, and goes to movies. He even lives through the presidential administrations of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Sr., and Ronald Reagan--but in that order!
Although his universe is the same as ours, it exists billions of years in the future. It has come to the end of its string and, like a cosmic yo-yo, has started traveling back UP the string to its beginning, with the result that every life is lived again--in reverse. People's sojourn through life begins with old age and progresses to middle age, youth, adolescence, childhood, and infancy.
Ultimately they're united with a mother, who takes them in and makes them part of her own substance.
It happens to everyone--except Adam Taylor. To his own amazement and frustration, he seems to be a man without a mother--and therefore immortal.
He makes friends, takes wives, and watches them "grow" into adolescence, childhood, and infancy, leaving him behind, decade after decade, century after century.
He spends the 1960s and 1950s with a Navajo jewelry artisan.
He witnesses the end of many eras--including the atomic.
He sees the end of European dominance of the Americas.
His quest for a mother to release him from life takes him toward the dawn of the neolithic.
The arts of civilization are abandoned with relief.
The Paleolithic is ushered in by an Ice Age.
The shamanic guardian of the Trois Freres cave in France holds the key that will set Adam free.
His epic journey through time reveals a mystery as true for us as for Adam Taylor: seen from beginning to end or from end to beginning, the life of everything that lives springs from the same womb and must inevitably return to it. The Man Who Grew Young |
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