The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Vintage)
By:
David Shields
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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5
Description:
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.
Description:
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
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2009-02-10
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Stills and a movie - I'm trying to determine why I found this book so fascinating. I think it has something to do with the rhythm. Shields offer us a series of snapshots--these being the many many factoids about our bodies--interspersed with the movies--these being the stories that he tells about himself and his father. This is his rhythm: snapshots, movies, snapshots, movies. I loved this interplay.
Shields has a wickedy dry, and yet very empathetic sense of humor. He piles up the facts and tells us a few stories. If you can find the secret of life in all this, fine. If not, that's ok as well.
Shields isn't pretending to offer any answers. That's the point: life flowers and wilts. In a way it's noble, and in a way, ridiculous. Bittersweet--that's how I'd characterize this book. Resigned. And fun to read.
Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Difficult To Review - For me "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead" is a difficult book to evaluate. Once I began reading it I wanted to finish it, but on the other hand, I kind of wish I had never started it.
The book is a compilation of David Shields' eclectic thoughts on living and dying. At times he is presenting his own thoughts and experiences and at other times he is reflecting on his father's life and experiences. This interaction often leads to some confusion as to who he is writing about. As a self-proclaimed New York Jew, Mr. Shields also presents certain aspects of life in a Mort Saul style where nothing is sacred (let it all hang-out), which at times is quite crass from my point of view.
The book is also crammed with quotes from various people, only a few of which I recognized. In addition, Shields fills the book with snippets of scientific facts about what the body goes through at various stages of development and aging. In the end, what the reader has is potpourri of information.
If you are looking for a read that will educate you on living and dying, I don't think this book will do it.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Makes Mulling Mortality A Mirthful Mind-Bender - Speaking as a 49-year-old male, who is at the same stage of life as the author, if you're going to ruminate about living and dying, this is the fun way to address it. At 51, Mr. Shields reflects on the aging process and his 97-year-old dad's opaque take on growing old. I think it's putting it mildly to say that the author's father comes across as a feminist's worst nightmare. The book is a merging of biological factoids and personal anecdotes that gel into a very satisfying read. It doesn't answer any of the big questions about our own mortality, but Mr. Shields does entertain and enlighten the reader about the aging process. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and kept reading small excerpts to my wife. Mr. Shield's memoir deserves a wide audience.
Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Networked Quotes - Initially, I was very excited about this book. While reading it, however, I became very frustrated. The book is largely composed of quotes, which are loosely connected to one another through random stories. Some of the quotes go on for pages without explanation.
Customer Review: 4 out of 5
A meditative mix of art and science - As a fan of creative non-fiction, and as someone who occasionally teaches classes on the lifespan, I've often thought that human development provides a fertile ground for writing that goes well beyond textbook boilerplate. David Shields has taken good advantage of that ground. Mixing his knowledge of literature with an elegant use of scientific research, this book provides an emotional, meditative, and personal journey through the lifespan of Shields and his father. The different strands are interwoven so well that I could never figure out what was a device for what; was the science used in service of the memoir, or the memoir in service of the science? I suspect the science was used as another way of trying to make sense of the complexity embedded in all of our lives, but the writing maintains a tone such that it does not really matter.
My only hesitation towards the book is that its meditative progression never fully gathers momentum. Each chapter's take on various parts of the lifespan is engaging and well-wrought, but my interest gradually faded in the absence of a more real tension than the general sense of negotiating a decent but imperfect relationship with a father. Nevertheless, the book is well-worth reading for any fan of creative non-fiction or anyone attentive to the way lives change over time.
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