The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead: A Memoir

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Feb 5, 2008 - Biography & Autobiography - 256 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Weaving together personal anecdote, biological fact, philosophical doubt, cultural criticism, and the wisdom of an eclectic range of writers and thinkers, a book that expertly renders both a hilarious family portrait and a truly resonant meditation on mortality.

“Shields is a sharp-eyed, self-deprecating, at times hilarious writer.”
The Wall Street Journal

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.

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.

From inside the book

Contents

Decline and Fall
9
Paradise Soon Lost
19
Motherhood
27
Hoop Dream ii
34
Rattlesnake Lake
43
3
48
Boys vs Girls ii
49
Superheroes
59
27
112
Notes on the Local Swimming Hole
121
Hoop Dream viii
135
Decline and Fall iii
139
The Thing About Life Is That One
151
Boys vs Girls iv
160
29
163
Death Is the Mother of Beauty
173

Hoop Dreams iv and
66
Ye Olde MindBody Problem
78
Decline and Fall ii
87
14
91
Bloodline to Star Power ii
98
19
103
Sex Changes Everything
104
The Trouble with Being Food
111
How to Live Forever i
181
114
184
How to Live Forever ii
189
Bloodline to Star Power iii
200
The Story Told One Last Time
211
Notes for Eulogy for My Father
218
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
227
Copyright

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Page 7 - The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

About the author (2008)

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.

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