USA: Wonderful Perspective on Life In "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead."

FREDERICKSBURG, Virginia (The FreeLance-Star), February 10, 2008: BOOKS THE THING ABOUT LIFE IS THAT ONE DAY YOU'LL BE DEAD By David Shields (Knopf, $23.95) OSCAR WINNERS outlive unsuccessful nominees by four years. Fingernail growth is fastest in November and slowest in July. There are about 70,000 centenarians in the United States. These are among the fascinating tidbits offered by David Shields in "The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead." Wonderful perspective on life and death Shields' ninth book is an unorthodox memoir--at once an homage to his 96-year-old father and a meditation on mortality--weaving hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking family anecdotes with puzzling facts about human biology. He supports and contrasts his own theories with quotes from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Leo Tolstoy, Marie Antoinette and Karl Marx. He explores life's system of reward and punishment through evolution and disease. On breast cancer: "Three of the risk factors are early menstruation, childbirth after 30 or no childbirth, and menopause after 50; you're urged, in other words, to get on stage when expected, hit your lines at the right time, and then exit on cue. Any deviation, and evolution punishes you." He shares the seemingly endless surprises of aging. On confronting a belligerent teen at the pharmacy: "I declined the drugstore fisticuffs, but I replied--with the emphatic approval of my middle-aged comrades in line--'Life has rules.' It does? I was appalled; it never occurred to me that I would ever say anything remotely resembling this. If life has rules, what are they?" He nostalgically relives the joys of youth and the peak of athleticism, while at the same time lamenting the physical and emotional awkwardness of adolescence. Shields on one page struggles to accept the lonely impermanence of life: "What I've been trying to get at all along, in a way, is this: the individual doesn't matter. You, Dad, in the large scheme of things, don't matter. I, Dad, don't matter." And on another, Shields rejects the cliched tragedy of the human condition with a beautifully simple tribute to his father: "In so many ways, though, he has showed me how to question received wisdom, to insist on my own angle, to view language as a playground, and a playground as bliss. He showed me how to love the words that emerged from my mouth and from my typewriter, how to love being in my own body, how to love being in my own skin and not some other skin." The thing about life is that one day you'll be dead, Shields says, but the thing about death is that first, you're alive. Natasha Altimirano is a freelance reviewer living in Washington D.C. Copyright 2008, The Free Lance-Star Publishing Co.