Book of the week: Selling the Fountain of Youth by Arlene Weintraub

(Basic Books, $25.95)

The “desire to defy age” isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, said Paul Harris in the London Observer. But, as Arlene Weintraub reveals in her meticulously reported book, over the past decade the revenue of the “anti-aging industry” has ballooned to an estimated $88 billion worldwide. “Much of it is based on replacing the body’s hormones as people grow older,” along with providing doses of vitamins and Botox.

Weintraub chronicles the anti-aging movement with vivid accounts of “battles between drug companies and large corporations,” said Bess Levin in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. There are also plenty of frightening scenes of “pharmacists mixing up their own concoctions in back rooms.” Two osteopaths, Ronald Klatz and Robert Goldman, began injecting themselves with human growth hormone in 1993 and later launched the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, which has “paved the way” for other organizations promising to turn back time.

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