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Ernest Becker

The Denial of Death Paperback – May 8, 1997

by Ernest Becker (Author)

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Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life's work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker's brilliant and impassioned answer to the "why" of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie -- man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates more than twenty years after its writing.

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336 pages
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English
Publication date

May 8, 1997
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5.5 x 0.8 x 8.44 inches
ISBN-10

0684832402
ISBN-13

978-0684832401
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D. Author of On Death And Dying It puts together what others have torn to pieces and rendered useless. It is one of those rare masterpieces that will stimulate your thoughts, your intellectual curiosity, and last but not least, your soul...

New York Times Book Review ...a brave work of electrifying intelligence and passion, optimistic and revolutionary, destined to endure...

Albuquerque Journal Book Review ...to read it is to know the delight inherent in the unfolding of a mind grasping at new possibilities and forming a new synthesis. The Denial of Death is a great book -- one of the few great books of the 20th or any other century.

The Chicago Sun-Times It is hard to overestimate the importance of this book; Becker succeeds brilliantly in what he sets out to do, and the effort was necessary.

About the Author

After receiving a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Syracuse University, Dr. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) taught at the University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State College, and Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is survived by his wife, Marie, and a foundation that bears his name -- The Ernest Becker Foundation.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: Introduction: Human Nature and the Heroic

In times such as ours there is a great pressure to come tip with concepts that help men understand their dilemma; there is an urge toward vital ideas, toward a simplification of needless intellectual complexity. Sometimes this makes for big lies that resolve tensions and make it easy for action to move forward with just the rationalizations that people need. But it also makes for the slow disengagement of truths that help men get a grip on what is happening to them, that tell them where the problems really are.

One such vital truth that has long been known is the idea of heroism; but in "normal" scholarly times we never thought of making much out of it, of parading it, or of using it as a central concept. Yet the popular mind always knew how important it was: as William James -- who covered just about everything -- remarked at the turn of the century: "mankind's common instinct for reality...has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism." Not only the popular mind knew, but philosophers of all ages, and in our culture especially Emerson and Nietzsche -- which is why we still thrill to them: we like to be reminded that our central calling, our main task on this planet, is the heroic.

One way of looking at the whole development of social science since Marx and of psychology since Freud is that it represents a massive detailing and clarification of the problem of human heroism. This perspective sets the tone for the seriousness of our discussion: we now have the scientific underpinning for a true understanding of the nature of heroism and its place in human life. If "mankind's common instinct for reality" is right, we have achieved the remarkable feat of exposing that reality in a scientific way.

One of the key concepts for understanding man's urge to heroism is the idea of "narcissism." As Erich Fromm has so well reminded us, this idea is one of Freud's great and lasting contributions. Freud discovered that each of us repeats the tragedy of the mythical Greek Narcissus: we are hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. If we care about anyone it is usually ourselves first of all. As Aristotle somewhere put it: luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow. Twenty-five hundred years of history have not changed man's basic narcissism; most of the time, for most of us, this is still a workable definition of luck. It is one of the meaner aspects of narcissism that we feel that practically everyone is expendable except ourselves. We should feel prepared, as Emerson once put it, to recreate the whole world out of ourselves even if no one else existed. The thought frightens us; we don't know how we could do it without others -- yet at bottom the basic resource is there: we could suffice alone if need be, if we could trust ourselves as Emerson wanted. And if we don't feel this trust emotionally, still most of us would struggle to survive with all our powers, no matter how many around us died. Our organism is ready to fill the world all alone, even if our mind shrinks at the thought. This narcissism is what keeps men marching into point-blank fire in wars: at heart one doesn't feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him. Freud's explanation for this was that the unconscious does not know death or time: in man's physiochemical, inner organic recesses he feels immortal.

None of these observations implies human guile. Man does not seem able to "help" his selfishness; it seems to come from his animal nature. Through countless ages of evolution the organism has had to protect its own integrity; it had its own physiochemical identity and was dedicated to preserving it. This is one of the main problems in organ transplants: the organism protects itself against foreign matter, even if it is a new heart that would keep it alive. The protoplasm itself harbors its own, nurtures itself against the world, against invasions of its integrity. It seems to enjoy its own pulsations, expanding into the world and ingesting pieces of it. If you took a blind and dumb organism and gave it self-consciousness and a name, if you made it stand out of nature and know consciously that it was unique, then you would have narcissism. In man, physiochemical identity and the sense of power and activity have become conscious.

In man a working level of narcissism is inseparable from selfesteem, from a basic sense of self-worth. We have learned, mostly from Alfred Adler, that what man needs most is to feel secure in his self-esteem. But man is not just a blind glob of idling protoplasm, but a creature with a name who lives in a world of symbols and dreams and not merely matter. His sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, his cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstract idea of his own worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper. And this means that man's natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasures of incorporation and expansion, can be fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols and so into immortality. The single organism can expand into dimensions of worlds and times without moving a physical limb; it can take eternity into itself even as it gaspingly dies.

In childhood we see the struggle for self-esteem at its least disguised. The child is unashamed about what he needs and wants most. His whole organism shouts the claims of his natural narcissism. And this claim can make childhood hellish for the adults concerned, especially when there are several children competing at once for the prerogatives of limitless self-extension, what we might call "cosmic significance." The term is not meant to be taken lightly, because this is where our discussion is leading. We like to speak casually about "sibling rivalry," as though it were some kind of byproduct of growing up, a bit of competitiveness and selfishness of children who have been spoiled, who haven't yet grown into a generous social nature. But it is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an aberration, it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to stand out, to be the one in creation. When you combine natural narcissism with the basic need for self-esteem, you create a creature who has to feel himself an object of primary value: first in the universe, representing in himself all of life. This is the reason for the daily and usually excruciating struggle with siblings: the child cannot allow himself to be second-best or devalued, much less left out. "You gave him the biggest piece of candy!" "You gave him more juice!" "Here's a little more, then." "Now she's got more juice than me!" "You let her light the fire in the fireplace and not me." "Okay, you light a piece of paper." "But this piece of paper is smaller than the one she lit." And so on and on. An animal who gets his feeling of worth symbolically has to minutely compare himself to those around him, to make sure he doesn't come off second-best. Sibling rivalry is a critical problem that reflects the basic human condition: it is not that children are vicious, selfish, or domineering. It is that they so openly express man's tragic destiny: he must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; be must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.

When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill, as did U.S. Congressman Mendel Rivers, who fed appropriations to the military machine and said he was the most powerful man since Julius Caesar. We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are.

The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call "cultural relativity" is thus really the relativity of herosystems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the "high" heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the "low" heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.

It doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as "religious" as any other, this is what he meant: "civilized" society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.

The question that becomes then the most important one that man can put to himself is simply this: how conscious is he of what he is doing to earn his feeling of heroism? I suggested that if everyone honestly admitted his urge to be a hero it would be a devastating release of truth. It would make men demand that culture give them their due -- a primary sense of human value as unique contributors to cosmic life. How would our modern societies contrive to satisfy such an honest demand, without being shaken to their foundations? Only those societies we today call "primitive" provided this feeling for their members. The minority groups in present-day industrial society who shout for freedom and human dignity are really clumsily asking that they be given a sense of primary heroism of which they have been cheated historically. This is why their insistent claims are so troublesome and upsetting: how do we do such an "unreasonable" thing within the ways in which society is now set up? "They are asking for the impossible" is the way we usually put our bafflement.

But the truth about the need for heroism is not easy for anyone to admit, even the very ones who want to have their claims recognized. There's the rub. As we shall see from our subsequent discussion, to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life. Everything painful and sobering in what psychoanalytic genius and religious genius have discovered about man revolves around the terror of admitting what one is doing to earn his self-esteem. This is why human heroics is a blind drivenness that burns people up; in passionate people, a screaming for glory as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog. In the more passive masses of mediocre men it is disguised as they humbly and complainingly follow out the roles that society provides for their heroics and try to earn their promotions within the system: wearing the standard uniforms -- but allowing themselves to stick out, but ever so little and so safely, with a little ribbon or a red boutonniere, but not with head and shoulders.

If we were to peel away this massive disguise, the blocks of repression over human techniques for earning glory, we would arrive at the potentially most liberating question of all, the main problem of human life: How empirically true is the cultural hero system that sustains and drives men? We mentioned the meaner side of man's urge to cosmic heroism, but there is obviously the noble side as well. Man will lay down his life for his country, his society, his family. He will choose to throw himself on a grenade to save his comrades; he is capable of the highest generosity and self-sacrifice. But he has to feel and believe that what he is doing is truly heroic, timeless, and supremely meaningful. The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don't believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times. We are living a crisis of heroism that reaches into every aspect of our social life: the dropouts of university heroism, of business and career heroism, of political-action heroism; the rise of anti-heroes, those who would be heroic each in his own way or like Charles Manson with his special "family", those whose tormented heroics lash out at the system that itself has ceased to represent agreed heroism. The great perplexity of our time, the churning of our age, is that the youth have sensed -- for better or for worse -- a great social-historical truth: that just as there are useless self-sacrifices in unjust wars, so too is there an ignoble heroics of whole societies: it can be the viciously destructive heroics of Hitler's Germany or the plain debasing and silly heroics of the acquisition and display of consumer goods, the piling up of money and privileges that now characterizes whole ways of life, capitalist and Soviet.

And the crisis of society is, of course, the crisis of organized religion too: religion is no longer valid as a hero system, and so the youth scorn it. If traditional culture is discredited as heroics, then the church that supports that culture automatically discredits itself. If the church, on the other hand, chooses to insist on its own special heroics, it might find that in crucial ways it must work against the culture, recruit youth to be antiheroes to the ways of life of the society they live in. This is the dilemma of religion in our time.

Conclusion

f0 What I have tried to do in this brief introduction is to suggest that the problem of heroics is the central one of human life, that it goes deeper into human nature than anything else because it is based on organismic narcissism and on the child's need for selfesteem as the condition for his life. Society itself is a codified here system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society thus is a "religion" whether it thinks so or not: Soviet "religion" and Maoist "religion" are as truly religious as are scientific and consumer "religion," no matter how much they may try to disguise themselves by omitting religious and spiritual ideas from their lives. As we shall see further on, it was Otto Rank who showed psychologically this religious nature of all human cultural creation; and more recently the idea was revived by Norman O. Brown in his Life Against Death and by Robert Jay Lifton in his Revolutionary Immortality. If we accept these suggestions, then we must admit that we are dealing with the universal human problem; and we must be prepared to probe into it as honestly as possible, to be as shocked by the self-revelation of man as the best thought will allow. Let us pick this thought up with Kierkegaard and take it through Freud, to see where this stripping down of the last 150 years will lead us. If the penetrating honesty of a few books could immediately change the world, then the five authors just mentioned would already have shaken the nations to their foundations. But since everyone is carrying on as though the vital truths about man did not yet exist, it is necessary to add still another weight in the scale of human selfexposure. For twenty-five hundred years we have hoped and believed that if mankind could reveal itself to itself, could widely come to know its own cherished motives, then somehow it would tilt the balance of things in its own favor.

Copyright © 1973 by The Free Press

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Free Press; First Free Press Paperbacks Edition (May 8, 1997)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0684832402
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0684832401
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.44 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #20,446 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #28 in Sociology of Death (Books)
- #38 in Grief & Bereavement
- #70 in Medical General Psychology

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Ernest Becker

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After receiving a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Syracuse University, Dr. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) taught at the University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State College, and Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is survived by his wife, Marie, and a foundation that bears his name--The Ernest Becker Foundation.

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Deogratias Rweyemamu

Work of Genius

Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2016

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With little understanding of psychoanalysis and psychology in general, it was a bit of a struggle comprehending the full contents of the book. Credit goes to the author in his ability to provide a coherent flow of content and constant regard for the layman.

Becker's philosophy seems to centre on four pillars that he further goes onto detail in the remainder of the book: one, that the world is much more terrifying than we observe and admit.

Two, that the basic motivation for human behaviour is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death. Terror being, to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, a conscious of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self expression -- and with all this yet to die.

Three, that we conspire to keep death unconscious. Mainly through two lines of defense: the vital lie of character and a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth.

And four, our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world.

One of Becker's early prescriptions is contemplation of the horror of our inevitable death, paradoxically, this may just be the tincture that adds sweetness to mortality.

The following quotes most resonated with me in the book:

"As Aristotle somewhere put it: luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow. Twenty five hundred years of history have not changed man's basic narcissism; most of the time, for most of us, this is still a workable definition of luck."

"As Montaigne said, the peasant has a profound indifference and a patience towards death and the sinister side of life; and if we say that this is because of his stupidity, the let's all learn from stupidity."

"Immortality: living in the esteem of men yet unborn, for the works that you have contributed to their life and betterment."

"...that it takes sixty years of suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself - least of all himself. He feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn't make any difference as far as the ultimates are concerned. He has to go the way of the grasshopper, even if takes longer.

Becker throughout the book builds on the works of earlier giants in the field of psychology, most notably, Freud, Jung, Rank and Kierkegaard.

In the end of the book, Rank's insight is brought to light: what new immortality ideology can the self knowledge of psychotherapy provide to replace this? Obviously, none from psychology - unless psychology itself becomes the new belief system.

The author makes a sombre concluding remark that I found quite revealing: creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness.

Despite the awareness that psychology has brought bare from the chapters of the book, I'm still left in agreement with Rank's realization that the only way to get beyond the natural contradictions of existence is in the time-worn religious way: to project one's problems onto a god figure, to be healed by an all embracing and all justifying beyond.

I recommend this book to those in search of healthier questions about our existence and a more meaningful life.

245 people found this helpful

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Pumpjack

The basic human predicament: We are “gods with anuses”

Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2017

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The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker is a fascinating work that seeks to rehabilitate Freud and ground psychoanalysis in the human condition — notably our knowledge of our mortality and the strategies we use to construct denial mechanisms, or immortality projects, as he calls them, to function in the world as if we won’t die.

Becker, who ironically died shortly after it was published received a posthumous Pulitzer for the book. It sets out to acknowledge the incredible, though somewhat misguided, effort of Freud to create a system of psychiatric enquiry from thin air. His major critique of Freud is twofold: that he stopped too soon (or, rather, didn’t go deep enough) and that psychoanalysis must become, in essence, another form of mortality-denying religion (not necessarily a criticism).

Freud stopped to soon because, in Becker’s mind, all the mother-hating and inappropriate sexualizing loving and fear of castration and anal concerns and weird sexual stuff is really just a patina over the ACTUAL problem: fear of death and the fact that, to be successful, we must pretend to overcome — or fool ourselves into ignoring — that fear.

The religion part is related to the balm religious frameworks provide in giving us an immortality project and sense of comfort in the world. Psychoanalysis, and specifically the accidental worship of the analyst — transference — is in essence, a surrogate religion. Again, he’s not saying that’s a bad thing — religion, in his opinion (and he uses Kierkegaard as the channel of thought here) can help us effectively compartmentalize our fear of death and the potential paralysis and damage that comes with it. However, worshiping your therapist can be detrimental to progress.

But, oddly, progress itself can be detrimental to progress.

If, as Becker believes, neuroses actually are challenges to our necessary immortality projects — the lies we tell ourselves to act as if we are immortal when, in fact, we know we’re not and are greatly affected by that subsumed knowledge — “curing” a condition requires helping people lie more effectively to themselves. Depression, fetishes, schizophrenia, etc., it seems, are all perfectly “rational” responses to the existential angst that defines human existence. Psychoanalysts, he argues, should help people repair damages to the their self-constructed shields and not strip away the defenses we need to function.

It’s fascinating stuff, but now 40 years later, it’s hard to reconcile some of the core concepts in this book with the latest in cognitive research — using tools that were simply unimaginable at the time. While current thought still points to the denial of death (or, perhaps, to an affirmation of successful reproductive strategies) as a motivating factor in the concept of self, it’s grounded in much harder science — neurochemical imbalances, heuristic systems, developmental origins of health and disease, brain imagining, structural abnormalities, genetics and so forth.

I’m an unabashed materialist — I believe the answers, and sources of problems, can be found in our biology and the systems we use to move through the world ¬— but this reductionism in no way degrades my sense of wonder: these biologic systems, these bodies, the disembodied forces shared between humans (though still generated by biology), are truly amazing and sources of wonder and awe.

Becker stands on the shoulders of Freud and Kierkegaard, Carl Jung and Otto Rank, people who excavated the ethereal world of the human condition using only their own intellect and powers of observation. They helped create the science of psychology and continue to shape the thinking around it today, even as that science has moved ahead by light years.

Here are a few of my favorite lines:

“… ‘civilized’ society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal.”

“ … the emergence of man as we know him: a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none.”

“Sex is an inevitable confusion over the meaning of his life, a meaning split hopelessly into two realms—symbols (freedom) and body (fate).

“We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do no really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us.”

This is a satisfying foundational book that, even though it seems to have weathered a bit in the passage of time, is well-worth the read.

81 people found this helpful

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john m.

The most important book ever written IMO.

Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2018

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One of the best and most important books ever written. (The best IMO( However one must be ready to emotionally handle the most disturbing truth that a human can ever know. I'm not kidding. However if you really want to understand why humans act so irrationally much of the time this is where you will find your answer. This did not get the Pulitzer prize for nothing. But be ready as it will likely change your life and you might have trouble handling that change. It's the challenge of your life and I hope you take it on. If everyone could I believe we could finally find the peace on earth we claim to be after.

68 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Mike

Depending on what you want from a book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 9, 2019

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Like most of the books that have made my ever expanding reading list. This was at times a joy to read and others something I would have liked to set fire to. It undoes some fundamental ideas of how we are in the world, and surprisingly gives cause to laugh at some of them too.
I would recommend for anyone wanting to read this, when finished. Engage in at least 30 mins of meditation, or something of similar ilk that suites your way, or cultural way of being, you might need the space to breathe afterwards.
Can't complain about shipping, service etc, all went swimmingly well

19 people found this helpful

Ciaran O'Regan

Be careful reading Becker because you can't unread him

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 5, 2021

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The above was a note I wrote to myself at one point while reading this book. That this work won't the Pulitzer Prize and has been so impactful on so many people is of no surprise to me. I read this after having already read "The Worm at the Core" by Solomon et al and would recommend the same to anyone else looking to venture into Becker. Solomon and co. provided a wonderful intro to Becker's work as well as the field of research psychology they created to investigate his work: Terror Management Theory.

Both "The Worm at the Core" and "The Denial of Death" are books I would recommend to anyone who was willing to grapple with the deepest question that faces an individual human: how to live in the face of death.

4 people found this helpful

David Wylie

Brilliant and disturbing. It tears down much of what we build up to protect ourselves

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 14, 2020

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Just finished it and I'm left feeling disturbed. This is a good thing as some very deep questions have been answered and asked.

Absolutely brilliant book. Very heavy going and may require some knowledge of psychology to get it.

It gets right to the core of what it means to be human, how we ignore really and what we can do about it.

5 people found this helpful

Dáibhí Ó Bruadair

Possibly the best book I've ever read. Life changing.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 28, 2016

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Extraordinary. Possibly the greatest book I have ever read. It just exudes knowledge of psychology and sums it up superbly. It gives an insightful perspective on human nature and on the meaning of life. It's a book I've studied, not merely read. And I love returning to the parts I've marked out as pieces that have enriched my appreciation for life.

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Nick H

Unreadable

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 5, 2021

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This may or may not be brilliant and insightful but I may never know because it is unreadable in paperback and would probably be hard going even on the Kindle with a larger font.
As you can see from the attached photograph, the font is tiny and consists almost entirely of long, fully justified paragraphs (It's actually worse than it looks because the photo is very well lit).
Maybe I could have managed when I was younger and my eyesight was better but this looks like it was created by somebody who hates reading :-(

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