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The Thing about Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead
by David Shields
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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780307268044 |
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Powells.com Staff Pick
"I've been weirdly giddy ever since finishing the book," David Shields admits. "Somehow I find the mortality data strangely liberating." Somehow this isn't surprising. In The Thing about Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, Shields takes readers from womb to casket, addictively blending family narrative, biological science, and wisdom from the likes of Schopenhauer and Ice-T. It all adds up to an audacious and, yes, lively collage.
Recommended by Dave, Powells.com (read Dave's interview with David Shields)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
Mesmerized — at times unnerved — by his ninety-seven-year-old father's nearly superhuman vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an investigation of the human physical condition. The result is this exhilarating book: both a personal meditation on mortality and an exploration of flesh-and-blood existence from crib to oblivion — an exploration that paradoxically prompts a renewed and profound appreciation of life.
Shields begins with the facts of birth and childhood, expertly weaving in anecdotal information about himself and his father. As the book proceeds through adolescence, middle age, old age, he juxtaposes biological details with bits of philosophical speculation, cultural history and criticism, and quotations from a wide range of writers and thinkers — from Lucretius to Woody Allen — yielding a magical whole: the universal story of our bodily being, a tender and often hilarious portrait of one family.
A book of extraordinary depth and resonance, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead will move readers to contemplate the brevity and radiance of their own sojourn on earth and challenge them to rearrange their thinking in unexpected and crucial ways.
Review:
"Inspired by the immense vitality of his 90-something father, author Shields (Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine) looks at the arc of a human life in order to come to terms with mortality. Organized into four stages of life-infancy and childhood, adolescence, adulthood and middle age, old age and death-Shields's short, snappy chapters are crafted from personal anecdotes (many featuring his wife and teenage daughter), literary-philosophical musing and enlightening scientific data, examining a wide range of human concerns relating to 'the beauty and pathos in my body and his body and everybody else's body as well.' Shields also visits historical and contemporary figures, from Sigmund Freud to John Ruskin and Woody Allen, for their thoughts on mortality; says Picasso, 'One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it's too late.' Shield's eclectic approach and personal voice makes this extended meditation on living and dying a pleasing and occasionally profound read." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"'You cannot stare straight into the face of the sun, or death,' proclaimed La Rochefoucauld in the 17th century. Two new books prove the epigrammatical Frenchman wrong; Irvin D. Yalom and David Shields have stared deliberately at death. Although both got scorched, they survived to recount their quests in volumes whose contrasting approaches illuminate each other. Yalom, a practicing..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review)
Review:
"David Shields has accomplished something here so pure and wide in its implications that I almost think of it as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth." Jonathan Lethem
Review:
"It's a bold writer who dares to tackle head-on the subject of what it means to be human — something that David Shields does with an extraordinary mixture of tenderness, humor, and inexhaustible curiosity." Jonathan Raban
Review:
"The Thing About Life grabbed me from the start. It's extremely compelling, gorgeous in many places. I loved it. And I wish I had written it." Lauren Slater
Review:
"Mr. Shields is a sharp-eyed, self-deprecating, at times hilarious writer." Wall Street Journal
Review:
"Enthralling, perplexing, illuminating and discombobulated....[A] fascinating, demanding read." San Francisco Chronicle
Review:
"There are paragraphs so finely wrought, so precisely tuned to the narrow-band channels between reader and writer, that the caught breath of inspiration and the sighs of expiration leave us grinning and breathless....This diamond of a book." Boston Globe
Review:
"[W]hen Shields sat down to write, he made a wise and generous decision: to convey what he learned in a confident but self-deprecating manner, the way a smart friend might share facts over the dinner table." Seattle Times
About the Author
David Shields is the author of eight previous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Black Planet (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Remote (winner of the PEN/Revson Award), and Dead Languages (winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award). A senior editor at Conjunctions, Shields has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, The Yale Review, the Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and The Believer. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington.
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 39 comments:
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Edward, March 13, 2008 (view all comments by Edward)
This isn't really a book about life as much as it is a lament about his father.
There are all sorts of 'feel good' quotes and anecdotes.
The title says it all-- and quite frankly for all the publicity it is absolutely over rated!
I like Bill Murray too but I couldn't get though this entire book without throwing up.
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mollymalcolm, February 24, 2008 (view all comments by mollymalcolm)
I turned 35 this year, and I am suddenly very aware of my aging. It's not the physical changes in themselves that bother me so much, it’s realizing that they are the warning signs of my “imminent” death. The Thing About Life has been quite a cathartic confrontation for me. The statistics of how our bodies atrophy were penetrating and persistent. I was seeing my body turning into ashes as I read the chapters and I didn’t want that! The rawness of Shields’ writing, his laugh out-loud anecdotes, and the hope Shields’ father was giving me, as the exception to all the statistics, made all the cold hard facts disappear. As he kept forcing me to stare death in the face, suddenly what had been terrifying and uncomfortable wasn’t so much anymore. He turned death into a well known friend (well, one that you’d like to keep at a distance). I couldn’t put the book down. Shields has such an ability to laugh at himself. His boldness and freedom in the way he exposes himself takes you on a journey as if you where under his skin. And you love the ride. I came out the other end feeling like the weight of death had been lifted off my back, with an acceptance of the bitter-sweet reality of being alive, and the feeling of not wanting to waste another second.
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barriejeanborich, February 22, 2008 (view all comments by barriejeanborich)
Such an interesting book in terms of both form and voice. The clean, athletic and direct prose is at once evocatively descriptive and baldly factual--in keeping with all of Shields' work. And the mosaic form allows for a complex twining of reoccurring and advancing narrative and ruminative threads that will engross and challenge a reader who enjoys a thinking approach to the body and an embodied approach to thinking the body through. And yet the structure of this book is not a random collage, but is rather deeply bound to the oldest of human plots--birth to coming of age to middle adulthood to death. The fragments of this book's trajectory are made up of vignettes about the narrator's own body and those of his immediate family, interlaced with statistics that do not shy away from blood and pain and sex and the dumb actualities of our ever-changing corporeality, tumbling the reader splendidly forward, toward the most common of human inevitabilities.
My considerable engagement with this project does not come of always recognizing myself its content, nor should it, as simple agreement would be a disappointment. As a reader entering this text from outside a few of its paradigms--heterosexual coupling and reproduction far from the center of my existence, and that of most of my intimates-- I do resist some of the biological imperatives suggested on these pages. How significant, really, are the animal shadows to non-reproductive sexuality and family life, and is the apparently reproductive-bound plumbing of the female body always the source of mother-daughter rivalry, or are the tensions of female domestic identity formation more complex than one psychoanalytic source might suggest? I'm not always sure when the author is commenting and when he is simply reporting. I'm much more engaged here in the illuminations of how heterosexual men live in the narrative arc of their bodies than I am convinced by the narrator's suppositions into the bodies of women (although the quotations of Kim Chernin's insights into female anorexia are well-used.)
But such readerly argument and internal debate is precisely the point of reading personal/lryic essays written from the full embrace of personal and particular human point of view, and the self-portrait that comes through on these pages is the achievement and importance of the book. I love a cranky, quirky, questioning voice such as this one precisely because it is not my voice. Such is the point of literature, to read across our borders in search of those animal shadows that may or may not unite us, but will push us into a conversation that helps us comprehend our shared journey, from cradle to grave.
Barrie Jean Borich
author of My Lesbian Husband
View all 39 comments
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780307268044
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Knopf Publishing Group
- Author:
- Subject:
- Personal Memoirs
- Subject:
- Authors, American
- Subject:
- Fathers and sons
- Publication Date:
- February 2008
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 225
- Dimensions:
- 8.63x5.95x.98 in. .89 lbs.
