Thoughts & News
The Thing About Life in paperback
03/01/2009
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead was reissued in paperback by Vintage in February 2009.
The book appeared on New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the best books of the year by Amazon, Salon, ArtForum, TimeOut Chicago, and the Seattle Times.
On Amazon, Jon Foro said, “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 and, 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. 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.”
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