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

A Memoir

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

Written by: David Shields
Narrated by: Don Leslie
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About this listen

 Mesmerized, at times unnerved, by his 97-year-old father's nearly superhuman vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an investigation of the human physical condition. The result is this exhilarating book - both a personal meditation on mortality and an exploration of flesh-and-blood existence from crib to oblivion. It's an exploration that paradoxically prompts a renewed and profound appreciation of life.

Shields begins with the facts of birth and childhood, expertly weaving in anecdotal information about himself and his father. As the book proceeds through adolescence, middle age, and old age, he juxtaposes biological details with bits of philosophical speculation, cultural history, and criticism, and quotations from a wide range of writers and thinkers, from Lucretius to Woody Allen, yielding a magical whole: the universal story of our bodily being, a tender and often hilarious portrait of one family.

A book of extraordinary depth and resonance, The Thing about Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead will move listeners to contemplate the brevity and radiance of their own sojourn on earth and challenge them to rearrange their thinking in unexpected and crucial ways.

©2008 David Shields (P)2008 Random House, Inc. Grief & Loss Philosophy Professionals & Academics Relationships Witty Funny
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What the critics say

"David Shields has accomplished something here so pure and wide in its implications that I think of it almost as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth." (Jonathan Lethem)

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