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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307268044
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0307268047
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: February 05, 2008
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: February 05, 2008
Studio: Knopf
Alternate Versions: Click to Display
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Editorial Review:
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:
“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
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.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I have enormous respect for anyone who tackles a subject like this. It's hard enough to write anything, but writing an Important Book about Life and Death has to be one of the toughest assignments of all. So my hat is off to Mr. Shields for the attempt.
But to be honest, the book and I didn't connect. It feels strained, the product of a mind working hard to come up with a steady stream of Profound Observations. A book of this type has to seem effortless or it sinks under its own weight.
The recurring sections of "science fun facts," so beloved by other reviewers, felt distancing to me. In the final analysis, the tallies of breaths and heartbeats and physical changes really have little to do with the subjective human experience of life and death. These digressions have all the philosophical spark of a biology textbook.
The other repeated shticks -- the father, the sports, the kids -- seem adventitious as well, like a framework introduced to impose structure ... Read More
Rating:  -
I really believe that everyone is afraid to die, whether or not they actually admit it. As the author so correctly says, young children and teens really believe they are immortal, even though they understand, to a degree, the concept of death. To them, death is something that happens to "other people". Steven Wright, the comedian perhaps said it best when he opined "I intend to live forever; so far so good!" Or perhaps Woody Allen, who said: "I'm not afraid of dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens!" This extremely well-written book takes us from birth to death, and hits all of the stops in between. It explains in great detail why and how our bodies break down so that we can't live forever, and perhaps not even beyond the age of 125, which extremely few people ever reach anyway. He intersperces his information with tales of his father who, at the time of writing, was 97 and planning to live to be 100. The stories of his dad are quite interesting, and they show how a person can ignore ... Read More
Rating:  -
The title of this review says it all. If you are someone who, like the author, is mildly to moderately depressed, then this is your book. The main thrust of the book seems to me to be: "How dare my father be so vital at his advanced age while I suffer from crippling back pain. Oh, the unfairness of it all." The author shows zero psychological insight into his condition. Another theme of the book is: "Once you've had kids, or are past child rearing age, you're done. Give up, roll over, and have the good grace to die." This is truly a feel-bad book. Nothing about psychological growth of the individual. Jung believed that this process STARTED around age 50. I give the book two stars because there are some pithy sentences.
Rating: -
And what a trip! I was mesmerized by Shields' adroit juxtapositions of facts, quotations, personal anecdotes and sheer musings. In perfect counterpoint, his logical, reasoning reporter voice succumbs to his non-linear, subjective yarn-spinner meanderings, and so it goes -- the thrust and parry of right-brain-then-left-brain advances, leaps, detours, and backtracks. I have to agree with at least half of what he says was written about him on the wall of a ladies' restroom, "David Shields is a great writer and a babe to boot." (The former is definitely accurate and if he inherited even a little of his father's self-described magnetism, I'm sure the latter is equally true!) Thanks for this wonderful, unforgettable book.
Rating: -
When I told my wife the title of the book I was reading she responded "Why do you always read depressing books?" The startling thing about this book is that it's not depressing at all, although it joins my short list of books that look life and death squarely in the face. (See my review of Anne Roiphe's "Epilogue" for another). Shields combines a plethora of facts about our mortality with an ongoing account of his relationship with his 97 year old father. The book is extremely personal and hugely informative at the same time. It is chock full of statistics or all sorts (did you know that 72% of Americans believe in angels?) and full as well as wonderfully touching anecdotes about his father and family. His father, at 97, still rages against the dying of the light, but in three sentences, Shields explains his differing view and also the reason his book is so engaging and even uplifting: "Aging followed by death is the price we pay for the immortality of our genes. You [his father] find this information ... Read More
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