The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead
Mesmerized—at times unnerved—by his ninety-seven-year-old father’s nearly superhuman vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an investigation of...more
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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
Shields hasn’t so much written a book as he...more
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
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
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
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
...more
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
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
...more
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
At first I was charmed by this book, but after page 50 I had to force myself to finish. Terrible.
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
--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
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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