Authors: David Shields
ISBN-13: 9781616880385, ISBN-10: 1616880384
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date Published: February 2008
Edition: Bargain
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.
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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