Warwick Cairns
Category:
Self-Help
A book about how we all ought to stop worrying and start living
Why is it that we worry so much when we are living longer, safer, wealthier lives than ever before? Why do we keep our children indoors, and deny them the freedom that we had when we were growing up. Why are phobias and obsessive disorders on the increase? How to Live Dangerously explains how the world has changed while our brains remain much as they were in the Stone Age, and how the pressures of the modern world and the power of the media trick us into believing that we and our families are under threat.
The book starts off from some of the more unusual fears and obsessions of our age and goes all the way to the structure and function of the human brain and beyond, by way of frivolous lawsuits, the chemicals in burnt toast, some confessions of childhood foolishness, the family tree of Genghis Khan, the traffic system of the Dutch town of Drachten, a rather unwise experiment you can do with an arrow, and some tips to help you be less frightened of spiders, or to do better at any dangerous sports you may happen to take part in.
The gist of it all, though, is that we all ought to stop worrying so much about things, and that we ought to get out and live a bit more, and take a few more risks.
And it follows from this that if you take the advice given in the book, bad things will happen to you. That’s what happens, you see, when you take risks.
But you should also find, if you follow the advice it gives, that many, many more good things will happen to you by way of recompense; and they will be things that will make you feel intensely and passionately alive, right here and right now.
How to Live Dangerously is published in Summer 2008 the UK by Macmillan, and later in 2008 in the USA by St. Martin's Press
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