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The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead | 
| Manufacturer: Knopf
Category: EBooks
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $7.96 (44%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  78 reviews
Sales Rank: 3025
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
ASIN: B0013SSPXC
Publication Date: February 5, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Significant Seven, February 2008: "After you turn 7, your risk of dying doubles every eight years." By your 80s, you "no longer even have a distinctive odor ... You're vanishing." "The brain of a 90-year-old is the same size as that of a 3-year-old." And it goes on and on. David Shields's litany of decay and decrepitude might have overwhelmed the age-sensitive reader (like this one), but The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead manages to transcend the maudlin by melding personal history with frank biological data about every stage of life, creating an "autobiography about my body" that seeks meaning in death, but moreover, life. Shields filters his frank--and usually foreboding--data through his own experience as a 51-year-old father with burgeoning back pain, contrasting his own gloomy tendencies with the defiant perspective of his own 97-year-old father, a man who has waged a lifelong, urgent battle against the infirmities of time. (If believed, his love life at age 70 was truly marvelous.) Interwoven with observations of philosophers from Cicero and Sophocles to Lauren Bacall and Woody Allen ("I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying."), Shields's book is a surprisingly moving and life-affirming embrace of the human condition, where inevitable failures and frailties become "thrilling" and "liberating," rather than dour portents of The End. --Jon Foro
Amazon.com Guest Review: Danielle Trussoni
David Shields's The Thing About Life is that One Day Youll Be Dead is an addictively punchy, startlingly brilliant exploration of our most essential relationship--the one between parent and child. Shields juxtaposes a storm of astonishing facts about the development of the human body ("By the time you're 5, your head has attained 90 percent of its mature size; by 7, your brain reaches 90 percent of its maximum weight; by 9, 95 percent; during adolescence, 100 percent") with an intimate portrait of himself as a son and father. The result is a naked, honest, and often funny book that forces one to look clearly at the realities of the body--especially the burden that biology imposes upon our inner life--in a fresh and disturbing way. The writing is fast, postmodern, and filled with quotations from such diverse sources as Shields's back doctor and Tolstoy. The style might be dizzying in the hands of a less perceptive narrator, but Shields has the eye of an archeologist cataloging the bizarre traits of an ancient civilization. How Shields managed to compress the whole mess of love, family, genetics, and desire into this elegant, elemental book is a wonder. --Danielle Trussoni, author of Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir
Product Description
Mesmerized--at times unnerved--by his ninety-seven-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--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, 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 readers to contemplate the brevity and radiance of their own sojourn on earth and challenge them to rearrange their thinking in unexpected and crucial ways. "David Shields has accomplished something here so pure and wide in its implications that I almost think of it as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth."--Jonathan Lethem
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| Customer Reviews: Read 73 more reviews...
 Closer than ever to death...right now...and now...and now... September 28, 2008
It kind of puts you in that river that sweeps you toward the end. It gets you thinking of all the things that can go wrong and lead to the stopping of your heart.
That said, there are plenty of interesting facts on every page. All this with a twist of sad humor.
 Whining and Meandering July 30, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Rarely do I not finish a book. I made an exception in this book. I was expecting a book of soulful insight and instead found a book of disjointed information presented in an awkward way. The further I read, the greater my sense that this book was not going anywhere. Finally, I stopped mid-chapter. Where was this author's editor?
 Dissapointment June 22, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I found this book to drag on and on and provide useless information. Yes the author did do a lot of research in finding the facts but the book itself was a huge let-down. It is about a young man and his stages of life, but chooses very bad stories that have facts in them. It goes back and forth about his relationship of his dad. It also tells many stores that the reader does not want to know. (i was thinking T.M.I. a few times) Im very mad at myself for buying it in a book store and spending $23 on it. It was a waste of money and of my time. I normally never stop reading a book unless im done with it. Although for this book, about 3/4 of the way through i really couldnt take it anymore and stopped reading it. It was that bad. Basically, it is a book about facts listed off in paragraphs. I saw no "inspirational messages" and it did not get me to look at life in a different way like all the reviews on the back had said. Dont waste ur time reading this!
The Thing about Reading this Book is that Someday You'll be Finished June 8, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
(Thank goodness!)
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 straight biological facts and others that consist of a multipage succession of quotations seem like "filler," a data vomit.
"The Thing About Life" stops just short of being a complete waste of time. Not a terrible book, but bordering on the lame-oh...Hence the three-star rating.
I enjoyed this book, but found it more to be a memoir of the author's life. May 26, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
The author's obsession with death is revealed throughout the book. The interesting question is: `Do atheists and theists view death in the same light?' If you read books by saints or religious people, you'll find that indeed they welcome death. Death to them is not an end but a beginning. At death, we are reunited with our loved ones. The world of the dead is another world where we are as much alive as in this world.
Throughout our body, since conception, a process of birth and death is taking place every second--new cells are born while old ones die. Our body is attuned to the constant bombardment of birth and death taking place, yet we--the part that is not the body (call it spirit or soul)--are not. Why? Why do some people welcome death while others shun away from it? Would we be scared of dying if there was no love in this world? These are actually very interesting questions to ponder.
A lot of the book was about the author's relationship with his father. I found some chapters slow. I wanted the author to go more into the core of life and death. Maybe I missed something. Maybe the author wanted us to learn about death through his relationship with his father. If he did, I missed the point. I also found too much personal information about the author and his family that distracted me from the essence of the book. For example, the author talks about his sex life, his girlfriend's herpes, and his acne during his youth. Was the book meant as a biography or a memoir?
I did like the scientific information included, such as the difference in size between a girl's and a boy's brain and the physiology of ageing.
Some interesting chapters in the book:
Our birth is nothing but our death begun: existence is warfare. Human beings have existed for 250,000 years; during that time, 90 billion individuals have lived and died.
Decline and fall: All mammals age; the only animals that don't age are some of the more primitive ones: sharks, alligators, Galapagos tortoises. Schopenhauer said, "Just as we know our walking to be only a constantly prevented falling, so is the life of our body only a constantly prevented dying, an ever-deferred death."
Life is that which gives meaning to life: life is perfected by death.
How to live forever: In ancient Greece, old men were advised to lie down with beautiful virgins.
Towards the end of the book you'll realize that we are not learning how to live, but how to die.
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