The Thing about Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead » (Reprint)

David Shields is the author of eight previous books, including Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (winner of the PEN/Revson Award), and Dead Languages: A Novel (winner of a PEN/Syndicated Fiction award). A senior editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published essays and stories in dozens of periodicals, including The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Believer. He teaches at the University of Washington and lives in Seattle with his wife and daughter.

Mesmerized and somewhat unnerved by his 97-year-old father's vitality and optimism, David Shields undertakes an original investigation of our flesh-and-blood existence, our mortal being.

Weaving together personal anecdote, biological fact, philosophical doubt, cultural criticism, and the wisdom of an eclectic range of writers and thinkers—from Lucretius to Woody Allen—Shields expertly renders both a hilarious family portrait and a truly resonant meditation on mortality.

The Thing About Life provokes us to contemplate the brevity and radiance of our own sojourn on earth and challenges us to rearrange our thinking in crucial and unexpected ways.

Anthony Pucci

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If you're comfortable with your own mortality, you'll enjoy the reflections offered by Shields on life (his own and that of his 97-year-old father) and death. Award-winning author Shields (English, Univ. of Washington; Dead Languages) explores the human experience from infancy to death and beyond, briefly addressing the notion of human immortality. The anecdotes he shares about his own life are vivid, engaging, and, above all, honest. He admits, for example, that his father's determination to live fully (and forever) generates in him feelings of both love and hate. Interspersed with his own story are numerous startling facts about the human condition, e.g., that we will take approximately 850,000,000 breaths in a lifetime and that the brain of a 90-year-old is about the same size as that of a three-year-old. In addition, Shields offers dozens of memorable quotations from sources ranging from Sibelius and John Wayne to Bertrand Russell and Neil Young. Shields compels readers to examine the mysteries of life and death, but if thoughts of "the end" depress you, take solace in the knowledge that Shields's book also comes to an end. Recommended for public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ10/1/07.]

Prologue: Letter to My Father xv

Infancy and Childhood

Our Birth Is Nothing but Our Death Begun 3

Decline and Fall (i) 9

Boys vs. Girls(i 12

Origins 14

Paradise, Soon Lost 19

News Flash: We Are Animals 23

Motherhood 27

The Actuarial Prime of Life, or Why Children Don't Like Spicy Food 29

Sex and Death (i) 32

Hoop Dream (ii) 34

Bloodline to Star Power (i) 37

Adolescence

Rattlesnake Lake 43

Boys vs. Girls(ii) 49

Why Lionesses Prefer Dark Brunettes, or Why Both Men and Women Are Attracted to Deep Voices 53

Superheroes 59

Hoop Dreams (iv and v) 66

Dying Just a Little 71

Ye Olde Mind-Body Problem 78

Sex and Death (ii) 81

Adulthood and Middle Age

Decline and Fall (ii) 87

Bloodline to Star Power(ii) 98

Boys vs. Girls (iii) 102

Sex Changes (Everything) 104

Memento Mori 108

The Trouble with Being Food 111

Everything I Know I've Learned from My Bad Back 114

Notes on the Local Swimming Hole 121

Sex and Death (iii) 124

Hoop Dream (viii) 135

Old Age and Death

Decline and Fall (iii) 139

The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead 151

Boys vs. Girls (iv) 160

Chronicle of Death Foretold 164

Death Is the Mother of Beauty 173

Life Is That Which Gives Meaning to Life 176

How to Live Forever (i) 181

How to Live Forever (ii) 189

Last Words 194

Bloodline to Star Power (iii) 200

Sex and Death (iv) 205

The Story Told One Last Time, from Beginning to End 211

Exit Interviews 214

Notes for Eulogy for My Father 218

Permissions Acknowledgments 227