The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Vintage)
by David Shields
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Book Summary Information
Author: David ShieldsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-02-10
ISBN: 0307387968
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Vintage)
Book Review: We all die, but do we really have to?
Summary: 5 Stars
"The Thing about life is that one Day You'll be Dead" is the book by David Shields, the balding, middle aged writer who has pain in several parts of his body and is coming face to face with the one thing every man, woman and child on the planet shares, death. No matter how rich, or how poor, how gorgeous or how hideous, we all die. It is just the natural way of things. The circle of life is the inevitability that everyone must come to terms with. Some of us gracefully and some of us kicking and screaming until the bitter end.
First, let me say, I read this book in three days. While some of you might do this kind of thing on a regular basis, it is no longer the norm for me. With kids, work, my personal writing, etc. reading is a luxury that has eluded my grasp more times than not the past few months. In this book, I thoroughly enjoyed the way David wove factual anatomical data with his own personal experiences and intertwined a few celebrity quotations in the mix so much I couldn't put it down. It is both educational as it is biographical, which was a unique perspective when dealing with the rise and fall of the human species.
David, as we all are is different from his father and at the same time very similar. His father lived to be 105 years old, was obsessed with his physical well being and spent his entire life dealing with depression. Both father and son are, or were, keenly focused on sports and as with any hobby that a person enjoys it at times gives you an emotional outlet and connection you are not always expecting. It always seems the stubborn crotchety people are the ones who find a way to make it well into their old age, just by their refusal to give in or step aside.
I will say the factual tidbits, (on one occasion there were two pages listing every channel and what was on TV at the time) lost me as pointless. It was a little overdone. The celebrity quotes got to be a little monotonous as well on occasion, but the majority of the novel had me mesmerized by its personal feel even while letting me know how eating a hamburger and fries was killing off all my vital organs. While it might be too late for me to make a large impact on my personal longevity I still enjoyed the book immensely.
If you happen to be somebody obsessed with death, this book is a must read. If you are a person obsessed with life then I would say ditto. If you are just the average Joe I still think you will find it engaging and very entertaining as well as enlightening. For all of us who fell asleep in health class as a teenager you might be surprised how many things you missed. The next time you order that brownie and ice cream for dessert keep in mind how many hours of your life you are sacrificing for that enjoyment. Then again, you might get hit by a bus on the way home so who really cares.
Great book and I would highly recommend it.
Summary of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Vintage)
New York Times bestsellerBest Nonfiction Book of the Year, TimeOut Chicago
Chosen by Artforum as one of the 25 best books of the year
Best Reads of 2008, Salon
Chosen as one of the twenty best nonfiction books of 2008, Seattle Times
Chosen by Amazon as one of its Significant Seven for February 2008 and one of the 50 best books of the year
Powell's Books New Favorite, Staff Pick
BookSense Selection
Finalist for the Washington State Book Award, 2009
Mesmerized and somewhat unnerved by his 97-year-old father's vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an original investigation of our flesh-and-blood existence, our mortal being. Weaving together personal anecdote, biological fact, philosophical doubt, cultural criticism, and the wisdom of an eclectic range of writers and thinkers--from Lucretius to Woody Allen--Shields expertly renders both a hilarious family portrait and a truly resonant meditation on mortality. The Thing About Life provokes us to contemplate the brevity and radiance of our own sojourn on earth and challenges us to rearrange our thinking in crucial and unexpected ways.
Amazon Significant Seven, February 2008: "After you turn 7, your risk of dying doubles every eight years." By your 80s, you "no longer even have a distinctive odor ... You're vanishing." "The brain of a 90-year-old is the same size as that of a 3-year-old." And it goes on and on. David Shields's litany of decay and decrepitude might have overwhelmed the age-sensitive reader (like this one), but The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead manages to transcend the maudlin by melding personal history with frank biological data about every stage of life, creating an "autobiography about my body" that seeks meaning in death, but moreover, life. Shields filters his frank--and usually foreboding--data through his own experience as a 51-year-old father with burgeoning back pain, contrasting his own gloomy tendencies with the defiant perspective of his own 97-year-old father, a man who has waged a lifelong, urgent battle against the infirmities of time. (If believed, his love life at age 70 was truly marvelous.) Interwoven with observations of philosophers from Cicero and Sophocles to Lauren Bacall and Woody Allen ("I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying."), Shields's book is a surprisingly moving and life-affirming embrace of the human condition, where inevitable failures and frailties become "thrilling" and "liberating," rather than dour portents of The End. --Jon Foro
Amazon.com Guest Review: Danielle Trussoni
David Shields's The Thing About Life is that One Day You?ll Be Dead is an addictively punchy, startlingly brilliant exploration of our most essential relationship--the one between parent and child. Shields juxtaposes a storm of astonishing facts about the development of the human body ("By the time you're 5, your head has attained 90 percent of its mature size; by 7, your brain reaches 90 percent of its maximum weight; by 9, 95 percent; during adolescence, 100 percent") with an intimate portrait of himself as a son and father. The result is a naked, honest, and often funny book that forces one to look clearly at the realities of the body--especially the burden that biology imposes upon our inner life--in a fresh and disturbing way. The writing is fast, postmodern, and filled with quotations from such diverse sources as Shields's back doctor and Tolstoy. The style might be dizzying in the hands of a less perceptive narrator, but Shields has the eye of an archeologist cataloging the bizarre traits of an ancient civilization. How Shields managed to compress the whole mess of love, family, genetics, and desire into this elegant, elemental book is a wonder. --Danielle Trussoni, author of Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir
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