The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead by David Shields

May 19, 2008 Denis rated it 5 of 5 stars

If, like this reader, you are somewhat obsessed with the topic of death, and that seemingly impending event at times puts a damper on your here and now, then you’ll likely be engaged while reading this memoir, too.

The book is very much homage to the author’s once spirited, indefatigable, and often annoying father, who is finally (at the age of 97) showing signs of mortality. In it Shields discusses different aspects of life, touching on birth, childhood, food, sex, etc.; and of course, death. Th...more If, like this reader, you are somewhat obsessed with the topic of death, and that seemingly impending event at times puts a damper on your here and now, then you’ll likely be engaged while reading this memoir, too.

The book is very much homage to the author’s once spirited, indefatigable, and often annoying father, who is finally (at the age of 97) showing signs of mortality. In it Shields discusses different aspects of life, touching on birth, childhood, food, sex, etc.; and of course, death. The pages are also soaked with fascinating statistics and explanations of death and decay of the human body. Also interesting are the many famous (and not so recognized) quotes on dying and aging.

For example, the second paragraph of the book sets the mood and opens Shield’s straight-forward treatise on dying with this interesting fact (and no doubt to show the seeming insignificance of little ole you and I):

‘Human beings have existed for 250,000 years; during that time, 90 billion individuals have lived and died. You’re one of 6.5 billion people now on the planet, and 99.9% of your genes are the same as everyone else’s. The difference is in the remaining 0.1%.’

And this revealing (and perhaps relatable and depressing?) quote by Edmund Wilson at 68: ‘The knowledge that death is not so far away, that my mind and emotions and vitality will soon disappear like smoke, has the effect of making earthly affairs seem unimportant and human beings more and more ignoble. It is harder to take human life seriously, including one’s own efforts and achievements and passions.’

And this one, on the lighter side, by Woody Allen: ‘The difference between sex and death is that with death you can do it alone and no one’s going to make fun of you.”

As the title hints, this memoir is told matter-of-factly, without sentimentality, without philosophical meanderings. It’s a quick and simple read.

A critique that I read on this book mentions that the author is obsessing, and wrote this memoir instead of seeing a shrink. That’s totally possible and plausible, but this reader is glad that he’s shared it with us, instead. Another reviewer mentions that this book is life affirming. I don’t see it that way. Shields mentions, once, that ‘life, in his view, is simple, tragic, and eerily beautiful.’ But, nowhere else in this memoir is that view showed, or elaborated on. Life affirming? Perhaps, in a roundabout way. The topic of death and dying is articulated very well. So, maybe further exploration is unnecessary. Like for Shields, this book was somewhat cathartic for this reader, too.
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Mar 01, 2008 James rated it 2 of 5 stars

The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll Be Dead is a difficult-to-define, genre-crossing brooding and searching book that combines biography and biology in an obsessive musing on Death. David Shields’ father is 97. David Shields is obsessed with his father’s vitality and seemingly miraculous health and amazingly long life. So instead of simply being grateful, he wrote a book about his obsession with death and all the related gritty details therein.

Shields hasn’t so much written a book as he...more

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Feb 18, 2008 Darga rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people who will someday be dead

Shelves: how-to-be-human, favorites

absolutely beautiful and amazing. i love this book so much i can't describe it. i'm going to make a point to read it once a year for as long as i live.

the book has so many interesting facts and quotes that i ended up dogearing almost the entire book, so i'll just include the prologue:

"this book is an autobiography of my body, a biography of my father's body, an anatomy of our bodies together- especially my dad's, his body, his relentless body.
this is my research; this is what i now know: the b...more

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Feb 02, 2008 Jay rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: your father

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead by David Shields is a brilliant book of nonfiction prose. Go no further. Add to cart. Check out. Not convinced? Ok, how about this? David Shields meditates on the body’s ungraceful trek to death by considering his young daughter’s athleticism, his own waning physicality at middle age, and his father’s insatiable virility. Did I mention his father is 97? As in his other books of nonfiction (e.g., Remote & Enough About You: Adventures in Auto...more The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead by David Shields is a brilliant book of nonfiction prose. Go no further. Add to cart. Check out. Not convinced? Ok, how about this? David Shields meditates on the body’s ungraceful trek to death by considering his young daughter’s athleticism, his own waning physicality at middle age, and his father’s insatiable virility. Did I mention his father is 97? As in his other books of nonfiction (e.g., Remote & Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography) Shields mixes myriad modes of prose: reportage (w/ extensive research); anecdote & memoir; prose poetry (e.g. in recurring descriptions of night dreams, the prose shimmers); list-making (includes thoughtful, often contradictory quotes about sex & death from other writers & thinkers, past & present); literature, cultural, and film criticism. The writing goes where it wants to go. Example: early on Shields recalls poignant instances of youthful physical strength giving way to fear of pain; the next paragraph: “In the Bhagavad Gita, the human body is defined as a wound with nine openings.” The paragraph following describes a newborn baby’s slow, even ugly development. The effect of this collaging is to feel Shields’ fixation on the body, its imperfections (a whole chapter on acne!), its beauty, its grotesque endurance. (Add to cart. Check out.) I love how Shields’ prose pushes so effortlessly into insight: “I used to want to urge him [his father] out of this macho pose until I realized that it’s a way to cheer himself up, to avoid telling mild good-bye and good-night stories, to convince himself and us he’s still a tough guy from Brooklyn not yet ready to die.” The prose readily admits confusion & complicity and speaks the unspeakable often (see end of chapter titled “Rattlesnake Lake”!). Most notably Shields tells the story of his complex relationship with his father, with his father’s imperfect body as it relates to his own imperfect body. A reporter of his father’s life, Shields is in awe of his father one moment, envious another, disgusted the next. I know they have your credit card on file! Add to cart. Check out. In the end we see the writer’s deep, complex admiration for his father: “He showed me how to love the words that emerged from my mouth and from my typewriter, how to love being in my own body, how to love being in my own skin and not some other skin.” (Add to cart. Check out) This amazing book gives me another reason to be happy about being a father to my dear son. (less)

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Jun 08, 2008 Kevin rated it 2 of 5 stars

The Thing about Reading this Book is that . . . Someday You’ll be Finished

A near-terminal case.

Author David Shields runs this book along parallel and often intersecting tracks. One is a litany of facts regarding the birth, maturation and aging process. The other consists of reflections on his own life and, particularly, the life of his 97-year old father.

Not everyone will find this a novel; revelation (Hey – people age and die! Who knew???!) or a fascinating story.

The chapters offering straig...more

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Dec 29, 2008 Laura rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: audios

The book had a lot of interesting facts and ideas, but didn't really seem to get anywhere with it...except if you count the really groundbreaking point that people will die...but I guess I should have gotten that one by the title. I guess what I am saying is that with this book, you should judge it by its cover.

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Mar 15, 2009 Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars

A sobering book at times, but also the book that made me realize I should start playing basketball again. Really, as I see it, I've got ten years left to play basketball and then a whole lot of years where it will no longer be possible.

The book is half-memoir and half meditation on death. I learned all kinds of interesting facts about death. Incidentally, the age of twenty-five is, in many respects, the peak of vitality. Our brains are as big and as active as they are going to be, both males an...more

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Jul 07, 2012 Nancy rated it 1 of 5 stars

Though I'm only about 50 pages into this nonsense, I can, with absolute certainty, say that Shields' "The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll Be Dead" is quite possibly one of the worst books I've ever encountered - and I've read all of the Twilight Series. The thing is, even in spite of the trite, predictable writing and Myers' deplorable characterization of Bella, Twilight still eclipses TTALITODYBD in its ability to weave a coherent, cogent linear plotline that, for the most part, makes s...more Though I'm only about 50 pages into this nonsense, I can, with absolute certainty, say that Shields' "The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll Be Dead" is quite possibly one of the worst books I've ever encountered - and I've read all of the Twilight Series. The thing is, even in spite of the trite, predictable writing and Myers' deplorable characterization of Bella, Twilight still eclipses TTALITODYBD in its ability to weave a coherent, cogent linear plotline that, for the most part, makes sense.

I’m not even exactly sure where to start in my attempt to describe this 225 page meatloaf of loosely related anecdotal reflection. But, I’ll try. Ok, so when I originally considered purchasing the book, the synopses and reviews suggested that TTALITODYBD was sort of a multifaceted exploration of the process of life coursing into the inevitability of death; an expertly woven combination of facts, statistics, philosophy and personal account that addresses one of man’s most terrifying realities. This sounded fantastic ! An interesting and informative dive into the complexities of the body from birth until death? Cool beans, I’m sold. Sign me up! And when it arrived in the mail yesterday after a week’s worth of anticipation, I was pumped. I couldn’t wait to start reading the man who quite honestly sounded like he just might be the David Sedaris of death. I sat down, grabbed a mug of tea, cuddled into a blanket and began to read with the intent of getting to know my 30 year old body a little bit better. Find out what it’s actually going through. What’s breaking down, what’s slowing down and what I can expect to occur in my next 30 or so years on this earth. Hey, let’s just say I like to be informed and don’t particularly enjoy surprises, especially when it comes to the possibility of my gums receding into the back of my skull. Anyway, I read about 30 pages and nearly threw the book across the room. Despite the obvious preponderance of fertile material, Shields’ simplistic, style-less writing just can’t bring any of it to life. Most of what I’ve read so far sounds like it’s been directly extracted from his 8th grade diary and somehow fused together into an onslaught of 3 page chapters that bounce and twirl and cavort from topic to topic with very little substance linking them all together.

Let me clarify by providing the example that set me off on this tirade: the chapter that introduces the section on Adolescence entitled “Rattlesnake Lake”. The chapter begins with a very apropos discussion of Shields’ battle with acne: the eruption of it across his face, ears, chest, stomach, buttocks, penis (more about Shields’ obsession with genitalia in a moment) and feet, his attempts to combat it with a wide array of soaps, liquids, gels and creams, and its genetic origins stemming from his mother. He then proceeds, loosely transitioning into a very superficial discussion of Dale F. Bloom’s article “Is Acne Really a Disease”, a project that takes no less than seven lines to complete before racing through a series of statistics regarding how fast hair grows, how pupil size peaks during adolescence, the rationale behind graffiti, why boys don’t listen to females, his father reminiscing about Dave’s punchball experiences, and Tolstoy. This is all within the span of a page and a half and Shields’ isn’t done yet. Hasn’t even gotten started. Within the next page, he discusses teenagers jumping off an exposed cliff into Rattlesnake Lake. He interjects some unnecessary statistics about bone mass and shoulder and hip girth, and the differences between male and female bravado. And then, this is where it just gets weird. At the end of this small paragraph regarding female timidity versus male arrogance, the boys in his scenario question each other after each dive, “How was that one? How did that look?” At this point, the reader is kicked in the face with an unnecessarily long characterization of Lyndon B. Johnson’s penis. Huh? How did we get back to penises? Do I need to know about Johnson’s johnson? What does this have to do with kids jumping off a cliff into a river? Oh wait, I get it, I really do. The phallic pinnacle of the mountain jutting up into the sky, the girls’ tentativeness approaching the edge of adolescent sexuality and yearning, hesitant to actually jump off into the lake of womanhood, the boys playfully challenging, urging one another to take greater and greater risks at the precipice of their youth. Yes, Shields, I get it. But did you? And even with all the obvious sexual metaphors, why end with LBJ urinating in front of his secretary, an admission of your own member’s “averageness”, and a confession that yes, you’ve checked out your father while at the urinal? Are you trying to suggest that male bravado originates from the presences of his protruding genitalia? Duh. Just say it Shields! It’s like Shields is trying to be hip or cool or funny with his cryptic alignment of random bits of curiosity and strange admissions of sexual confusion or inadequacy (save for the story of him at five years old rocking furiously on his rocking horse because in his words, “it just feels so good.” This is not authentic and reeks of Lawrence’s “The Rocking Horse Winner”) , yet I am only reminded of the elitist white-haired psychiatrist Will visits in the movie Good Will Hunting: “now, now, Will, no more Shenanigans, no more Tom Foolery, no more Ballyhoo.” Shields is not hip, or cool, or funny.

And this is what makes Shields’ writing so absolutely infuriating. This section, and most of his writing up to this point, expects YOU, the reader to make sense of his chaotic, discordant, unfinished writing. It’s not that he doesn’t have the ideas, he just can’t write about them in a coherent way. So, he relies on tricks and trivialities: statistics that look like they were lifted directly from Wikipedia, vague stories about his childhood and his own children, and continuous references to genitalia, all neatly separated by cleverly placed paragraph indentations, white space and spunky chapter titles containing roman numerals.

I can’t believe I’m going to read the rest of this, but I will. I’m that stubborn, and I generally like to prove myself correct in my early assumptions about a book. And unless something changes drastically in the next 180 pages or so, my assessment will stand that this is the single worst conceived book I have ever read. And I was forced to read Tom Jones in college. Just try to stomach that one.
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Apr 13, 2010 Susan Odetta rated it 2 of 5 stars

Mostly a litany of facts and statistics about life, aging, and death, many very interesting on their own, the most interesting aspect was what was written between the lines about the author's relationship to his own life and the life of his 97 year-old father. It made me wish the author had written a different book on the same subject - with more about why he seems to love his father and also wish his father would just hurry up and die already, why he seems compelled to independently investigate...more Mostly a litany of facts and statistics about life, aging, and death, many very interesting on their own, the most interesting aspect was what was written between the lines about the author's relationship to his own life and the life of his 97 year-old father. It made me wish the author had written a different book on the same subject - with more about why he seems to love his father and also wish his father would just hurry up and die already, why he seems compelled to independently investigate and re-check the veracity of all his father's often repeated family stories and then challenge his father if the story has been tweaked a little over time, why he is so apparently pissed off that he suffers from more physical complaints in his fifties than his dad does at 97, that he still doesn't measure-up to his own image of the man he thinks his dad thinks he should be.....I could go on and no. I guess having lost and then, after decades passed, regained loving contact with my own dad, who is 86, makes the remaining details of any time we have seem so precious. Or maybe relationships between fathers and daughters are not fraught with testosterone-fueled competition and envy.....I don't know. But I do know for sure that the son who wrote this book writes like a boy who is jealous and impatient, and what's so disappointing is that I had hoped to actually learn something about relationships between adult parents and children who have outgrown much of the hubris of maturing and can finally meet as genetically/spiritually related humans who all face death.

Some quotes from this book:
"That, finally, is all it means to be alive: to be able to die." J.M. Coetzee

'Victor Hugo said, 'Forty is the old-age of youth. Fifty is the youth of old-age.'"

".....much of the glory of sugar overload is way it mimics the biochemical frenzy of a full-blown block and crystallizes it into the pure adrenaline of a brief, happy high followed quickly by a crash. To me, sugar consumption is a gorgeous allegory about intractable reality and very temporal transcendence."

"I'm not so much a hypochondriac as a misery miser, fascinated by dysfunction."(less)

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Jan 31, 2009 Judy rated it 3 of 5 stars

I don't ordinarily go out and buy full priced hard cover books at the local bookstore. After reading a review of this book in the morning paper, however, I went right down Colfax to Denver's Tattered Cover and bought a copy. This, I thought, is the book I'd like to write, exploring the life cycle in parallel to the rise of my children and the fall of my aging mother. Think "Refuge" by Terry Tempest Williams, replacing naturalist with sports writer, and the Great Salt Lake of Utah with the street...more

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May 21, 2009 Ken rated it 2 of 5 stars

So here I am, facing down 40 and feeling better physically and emotionally than I have in several years. The last thing I needed was to read this book, which I picked up because it has been designated as assigned reading for all first-year undergraduates at my school.

The Thing About Life is categorized by the publisher as a biography. As a biography, the book succeeds in fits and starts, with tenderly rendered passages about the author's childhood, and especially about his father, an interesting

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So here I am, facing down 40 and feeling better physically and emotionally than I have in several years. The last thing I needed was to read this book, which I picked up because it has been designated as assigned reading for all first-year undergraduates at my school.

The Thing About Life is categorized by the publisher as a biography. As a biography, the book succeeds in fits and starts, with tenderly rendered passages about the author's childhood, and especially about his father, an interesting and vividly drawn character, someone I liked learning about.

However, Shields has inserted these biographical passages into a repetitive, finger-wagging meditation on death. It goes something like this:

You're going to die: yes, you. By the way, my father has remained vital well into his nineties. He's an interesting guy -- here's a tidbit about him. Oh, and you're going to die, and here are some details about how you and I will physically deteriorate as we age. Here are some early sexual experiences that I remember. Did you know that once we've reproduced, nature is done with us and it's time for us to die? Here's a story of my father, striving for connection with others and trying to give his life meaning. But the thing is, we all fail in the end because we DIE. And before that we'll get sick, feeble and ugly. Wanna hear some quotes from famous people about death?

Here's a sentence from this book that sums it up for me: "You find this information soul-killing; I find it thrilling, liberating."

Well, yes, I happen to know that one day I will die. And on days when I have some perspective on things, that knowledge can remind me to appreciate life, not take the small stuff too seriously, and not take my days on earth for granted.

But -- BUT: I'd rather focus on the living of my life than on the dying of my life. Perhaps this book was therapeutic for the author as he wrote it, but it was a lousy experience for me as a reader. Reading this book made me feel like I'd been listening to hour upon hour of well-crafted, well-played dirges. I'd rather have done something else with those bits of my limited time on earth. And I am glad that I wasn't asked to read this as a college freshman, when I was rightfully concerned with living my young, hopeful life, and didn't require that this hope be framed within extended meditations on my eventual decline and demise.

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May 05, 2013 Krista rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013, memoir, nonfiction

Biologist Steven Jay Gould said, “We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because comets struck the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, thereby giving mammals a chance not otherwise available; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a...more Biologist Steven Jay Gould said, “We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because comets struck the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, thereby giving mammals a chance not otherwise available; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer, but none exists.”

Coming on the heels of listening to Blue Nights, this audiobook might be seen as a further descent into morbidity for me, but it's not depressing in the least. Simply stated, from the time we are born we are destined to die, but most of us forget to live each day as though that were true. Not that this is a call to carpe diem; there are no strictures or philosophising to be found, just a compendium of facts.

David Shields says that The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead is: "An autobiography of my body, a biography of my father’s body, an anatomy of our bodies together — especially my dad’s, his body, his relentless body." And that's what it is: Shields weaves together his own biological experiences (from debilitating adolescent acne and dreams of pro basketball playing -- until a broken femur sidelines him-- to middle age and balding and chronic back pain), his father's biological experiences (his lifetime of athleticism, sexual exploits, and watching him finally slow down in his mid-90s), and many interesting anatomical facts with quotes on aging and dying thrown into the mix. Each strand in the weave is interesting enough, but in the end, it's hard to feel like it makes a cohesive whole. Shields is a sportswriter, perhaps a very good one, but as a result this book feels more like reportage than literature, and the prosier bits feel a little overwritten. (And the long bit about everything on his Dad's TV, every show from channels 1-99, "each trying but failing to answer the question how to live a life" was soooo boring to listen to and, more than anything else, felt like a word-padding, unnecessary infodump.)

As he recognises that his father is approaching his end, Shields pins him down on the more fantastical family mythology. Were they really related to the famous actor Joseph Schildkraut? Well, maybe, it is an unusual name… Did he really play baseball on a star-studded semi-pro military team in Okinawa? Well, he was the team accountant and someone you never heard of was on the team… As his father seems obsessed with immortality and staving off death (a lifetime of regular exercise, eating abstemiously, enquiring into cryogenics), it felt a little mean-spirited that Shields would so firmly establish his feet of clay -- especially while he's still alive. At 51, and not enjoying his father's good health, Shields comes off as someone working through some Oedipal issues-- going so far as to report his own measured penis size and confessing that it doesn't measure up to the peeks he's taken of his Dad's equipment.

So, in the end, I found the biographical/autobiographical material somewhat interesting but tainted by an air of disappointment and jealousy, and the anatomical facts and quotes to be very interesting, but an afternoon on the internet would have yielded them just as easily. The scariest fact: We are, within the likely span of my lifetime, going to achieve a type of physical immortality. I don't have any particular fear of death (maybe because I never really believe it will happen to me), but I can't imagine living for hundreds (thousands?) of more years.
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Nov 28, 2008 Lwright marked it as to-read

"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, ex...more

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Mar 13, 2011 Tammy rated it 4 of 5 stars

This humorous and immensely informative book follows the human life from birth to death. Told with self-deprecating humor, Shields frames the book both within his own middle-age ascendency along with his aged father who for so long seemed to defy the odds of dying.

Reading this book I often felt a sense of voyeurism, looking with morbid fascination at my own disturbing future unfolding before my eyes. Truly, it is not death I fear, but the dying. This book did little to disconfirm that fear; it o...more

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Apr 06, 2010 Christopher Payne rated it 5 of 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...more "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.(less)

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Feb 05, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine added it

Veteran writer David Shields's examination of decrepitude and mortality defies categorization, consisting of "love and loathing, romance and biology, an encyclopedia of aging and a memoir of an adult son running to keep up with his 97-year-old father" (San Francisco Chronicle). Shields's analysis of his conflicted relationship with Milton, of his cynical rebuttals to his father's joie de vivre, lies at the heart of this dispassionate meditation. Several critics complained that the essays lack fo

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Jun 30, 2010 Fred rated it 3 of 5 stars

The thing about this book is that sometimes it annoys. I actually decided to stop reading it when I was halfway through. But the other thing about this book is that often it's very interesting. Probably it's about half and half, and the half you like better (or the half you'll find annoying) will depend on what kind of writing you respond to.

There are roughly three modes of discourse in the book: the personal/family memoir, the straight scientific fact, and the liberal heaping doses of quotation...more The thing about this book is that sometimes it annoys. I actually decided to stop reading it when I was halfway through. But the other thing about this book is that often it's very interesting. Probably it's about half and half, and the half you like better (or the half you'll find annoying) will depend on what kind of writing you respond to.

There are roughly three modes of discourse in the book: the personal/family memoir, the straight scientific fact, and the liberal heaping doses of quotations from others.

The aspects of personal memoir are generally rather interesting. Shields's discussion of life as a quick progression toward sexual maturity and a long, long decline toward death is framed by a kind of sketchy dual biography of himself and his father. It's easy to see why he is fixated on his father, who is 97 at the time of the book's writing. He's a colorful guy, personable, quick with a story, and unrelenting in his desire to live as long as possible.

The scientific facts are often interesting, sometimes depressing in their bare expression of our biological condition. I often found these quite thought-provoking, although at times they provoked thoughts that preferred not to be disturbed. Anyone who is distinctly uncomfortable with contemplating his or her own mortality is hereby warned not to pick up this book. At other times, the litany of facts about the human body, how it matures, perpetuates its genetic code, and eventually breaks down feel too unleavened by some other voice. Fact after fact after fact can weigh on the reader, and after a while I felt justified in skimming some portions.

Finally, the cascade of quotes often have the same effect the scientific facts have. In fact, this is the least engaging aspect of the book. While Shields has plucked many excellent quotes and arranged them in a kind of conversation among themselves at times, this method felt unmediated by an authorial presence at times. Given that his more recent book, Reality Hunger, plays up this mode, it's clear he intended something like this. Perhaps in time this will seem brilliant. For now, given that I'm still very much attached to the kinds of storytelling traditions that Shields seems to find outmoded and restricting, this is where we part ways. I more often skimmed the quotes than I did the science, because, while there is a similar sense in both modes of reading an unmediated recitation of someone else's words, science has a tendency toward a direct, somewhat generic tone. I feel less assaulted by an array of literary "talking heads" when Shields layers on the facts, even if a glance at the source material would suggest he's operating at the same scant level of intervention in both cases.

Having been as annoyed as I've been with this book, I can't give it a particularly high rating. But since I found it compelling enough to come back to it even after quitting it, I can't give it a particularly low rating. Readers seem very much split on this one, either loving it or hating it. I did both in turn, so I'll land in the middle and hope that suggests both the worthwhile benefits of the book and the drawback inherent in its idiosyncratic execution. And in case you're on the fence, I'll reiterate the conclusion that's already featured prominently in the title: Everybody dies, even you.(less)

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Aug 08, 2008 Cole rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shields book is packed with trivia and minutiae about what it means to be alive- and what it means to die. Some of these tidbits are interesting, but as a narrator, he is absolutely unbearable. He is smug, he rambles and he is apparently the most insecure person in history.

At first I was charmed by this book, but after page 50 I had to force myself to finish. Terrible.

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Apr 02, 2010 Eric rated it 3 of 5 stars

Reading David Shields can be infuritating in that he has no qualms whatsoever about ripping passgaes from other people's work (if he had it is his way, he wouldn't bother to mention whose passages they were originally) and jumping from one idea to another without much care for keeping a narrative thread.

In the chapter that shares its name with the title, the author and his father are at a Mariners game. Oh, I get it: the game is so meaningless yet there are 18,000+ on hand and, well, the game is...more

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Jul 28, 2009 Robert rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Stupid book. I guess I came into it with a little bit too much "meaning of life" expectations and the book fell well short of that. Perhaps the sleeve blurb should have warned me what to expect. The book is a random weave between anecdotes about his 97 year-old father and how he's lived as long as he has, completely random quotes about life/death from authors, actors, and other people famous and not, and lastly Shields devoted entire chapters to the actual biology of aging and dying, in particul...more

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Jan 16, 2009 Reynolds rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

For some reason, many of the books that I end up enjoying the most are the ones I stumble on by pure chance - i.e. no review, no recommendation, just pick 'em up because they have a cool cover or a strange title (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City was one such serendipitous find). I was "shelf-reading" at one of the libraries I work at and the title of this book caught my eye so I checked it out. It is a wonderful combination of memoir and biology and anatomy and a meditation on life and living...more

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Dec 19, 2008 Stephanie rated it 1 of 5 stars

I am 3/4 of the way through this book, and the insertion of bodily decay facts has become intolerable. It's not cute after the first 20-30 pages. The narrator and the father are utterly unlikable in their own ways, although I must admit that some of the anecdotes are interesting, including the son playing bball and the father's early life. But at this point, I dislike the narrator so much that it is hard to go on. His whining obsession with his back pain and aging in general is obnoxious. I have...more

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Jul 02, 2011 Valerie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography-memoir, science, nonfiction

This book is a both a memoir and a mishmash of random facts about living and dying, and most times the two don't hang together that well. I enjoyed the trivia parts and the parts that illuminate the author's relationship to his father, but some of the other parts (the sports stories) bored me. The transitions are so poor that I would rather see the book separated into two separate projects, or perhaps into individual essays rather than chapters trying to form a coherent whole. For example, the c...more

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Jan 08, 2010 Akie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sciences-etc

I was initially convinced that this was a novel and thus steered clear, but then I discovered that it is a collection of musings and essays on mortality. The mix of the extremey personal with the extremely clinical resulted in an uneven tone, but the focus was consistent. I liked the structure of exploring mortality from different age perspectives. I also enjoyed the exploration of the inevitable tension between the author and his father---parents and children are naturally antagonistic in certa...more

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Apr 13, 2008 Michelle Bouchor rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a fairly well written book. It's just depressing to read about getting older. Also, I didn't really need to know that the author's penis is 6 inches long.

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Sep 28, 2010 Leslie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Indeed, it's true. "By age 35, nearly everyone shows some of the signs of aging, such as graying hair, wrinkles, less strength, less speed, stiffening in the walls of the central arteries, degeneration of the heart's blood vessels, diminished blood supply to the brain, elevated blood pressure...The maximum rate your heart can attain is your age subtracted from 220 and therefore falls by one beat every year. Your heart is continually becoming a less efficient pumping machine" (Shields 94). While...more

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May 15, 2009 Mike rated it 3 of 5 stars

Not sure if liked Shield's writing and the book as a whole as much as I enjoyed the factoids littered throughout the book:

--Nearly 60 percent of the hearing loss in people over the age of 65 is due to a build up of wax in their ears.
--You skin begins to lose its elasticity around 45. By 85, you don't have anymore.
--People over the age of 90 don't get cancer. Your cells aren't a good breeding ground.

It's not even that it's a despressing book, which one would gather from the title. The feeling of...more

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Mar 19, 2009 Dana rated it 1 of 5 stars

The Thing About This Book Is That By Page 30 You'll Wish You Were Dead. If I didn't have to discuss this book on Tuesday for class I would burn in this weekend in our full moon bonfire! I'm that desperate to see the pages ignite. If the author won't do it for me with words and images I'll be forced to do it for myself. I can't tell if I'm so put off by his tone, his syntax, or his need to be so "telly". When there are scenes they creep up in long stretches of dialogue that is so un-organic and u...more

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Apr 18, 2010 Jean Doolittle marked it as to-read

To quote Picasso, “One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it’s too late.” David Shields (Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine) gives us wise snippets from Lauren Bacall, Cicero, and Woody Allen, among many others. He also supplies tons of statistics and facts about aging and the ages of man and explores the relationship between parent and child—in particular, himself, his son, and his father, who was 90 at the time of publication—in this quirky, moving “autobiography” o...more

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Jul 10, 2012 Ruth rated it 2 of 5 stars

Given that Shields deals mostly with universals, I'm willing to forgive him the surprising number of references to sex--both the clinical and non-clinical references. What I'm not willing to forgive him for is his odd paragraphing, in which seemingly unrelated ideas are mashed together.

Large sections were merely collections of quotes or facts strung together with little to no comment or analysis. Although I recognize what Shields was trying to do with those sections, I don't think it worked. Ap...more

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