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: 4 out of 5
An interesting read but ......... - The author's love for his father overcomes his father's shortcomings. He, the father is described as a self serving, uncaring, over sexed narcissist with little to recommend him. Contrary to the author's filial love, the father is an ass hole (author's term). Descriptions of biological characteristics and the changes in these over a lifetime are too general to be of much value. Still, it's an interesting read.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Great read, funny - I really enjoyed this book. It makes you think about just how much our bodies start to break down after we have finished growing. It had a lot of interesting information in it. I liked reading about peoples last words and all the stories about the author's father. It was a quick read too because I didn't put it down much.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
We all die, but do we really have to? - "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.
Customer Review: 2 out of 5
#44 to Ballard - This book is a piffle, a trifle, a bagatelle about growing up, growing older, growing old. The author disgorges a ton of facts about biology and gerontology but they're not woven into any narrative or scholarly presentation. No, they're flung onto the page in seemingly random order, sarcastically and dismissively, with an authoral voice that sounds distinctly like a Woody Allen standup routine.
It doesn't help that they're intermixed with the most personal family history, endless references to sports triumphs in the author's youth, confessional passages about everything from his male pattern baldness to his penis size. We get to hear a lot more than we care to about his ailing father's libido, his grandfather's tailoring business, his wife's taste in clothes, his daughter's opinions about everything -- and of course his childhood sports triumphs. Did I mention his childhood sports triumphs?
It's like being stuck sitting next to a homeless man on the bus who insists on telling you his life story, unable to fathom why his every boil and insult isn't as interesting to you as it is to him. There's some good information here -- frankly a lot of good information -- but I found myself rushing to get through the book so I could get off the bus.
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.
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