Rebecca's Reviews > Every Third Thought: On Life, Death and the End Game

I read the first ~13 pages and skimmed the rest. McCrum has already written about his life-threatening 1995 stroke (I have a secondhand copy of My Year Off to read). It left him with minor walking difficulties, and in 2014, aged 60, he tripped and fell in central London. He hit his head and had to go to the hospital, but was sent home with just a bandage and some painkillers. Still, he treated this as a wake-up call and enrolled in physiotherapy as he faced up to his mortality in a new way. In his research he met with a surgeon, a psychoanalyst, and patients with cancer and Parkinson’s. He asks what a good death is and what the dying deserve. The problem with the book is that I’ve read many of McCrum’s source texts, and he doesn’t add much to their collective wisdom on ageing and death. I have to hope I’ll prefer his memoir of the stroke.