Jim read and liked Lena's review of This Will Kill You: A Guide to the Ways in Which We Go:

"This is a very strange book. If you have ever found yourself wondering, for example, about the precise series of events that cause your body to cease functioning should you happen to find yourself lost in the Sahara Desert without your water bottle,...more This is a very strange book. If you have ever found yourself wondering, for example, about the precise series of events that cause your body to cease functioning should you happen to find yourself lost in the Sahara Desert without your water bottle, this book can tell you. It can also tell you what happens to your body when you drop a hair dryer into your bathtub, find yourself ambushed by a Komodo Dragon, consume arsenic proffered by batty old ladies, or participate in an "unscheduled plane landing."

All tolled, the book details the physical unfolding of more than seventy different ways of dying. It is set up as a reference book of sorts, with each method of death getting brief commentary on the mechanics followed by statistics on how many die in that fashion and who is most at risk punctuated by examples of notable victims.

Somewhere, I noted that this book is being marketed as a tool for writers. If I find I ever need to kill a character via poison dart frog, it will certainly come in handy to have this book nearby. The authors do their best to keep the tone light with ample doses of dark humor, but there is something about the subject matter that kept me from finding it quite as funny as some of the blurbs suggested. Though I did enjoy (well, maybe that's not exactly the right word) learning as much about end-times physiology as I did, I was also left with a discomfiting sense of how terribly fragile we are. Maybe that's a good thing.
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