In his latest and perhaps most adventuresome book, Robert Kastenbaum offers a fresh view of the quest for perpetual youth. The focus is on the pretty monster that Oscar Wilde created a century ago in The Picture of Dorian Gray. We see Dorian first within the frame of his own times, responding to the pressures of modernization by attempting to escape the natural progression of time. Next we enter Dorian, the Opera, a re-imagining of his quest in the...