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"In this category-defying book, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects: death. She examines the final days of five great writers and artists. Here is Susan Sontag, the ultimate intellectual, finding her commitment to rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Here is Sigmund Freud fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna for London only to continue the constant cigar-smoking that he knows will soon kill him. Roiphe takes us to the hospital room where, after receiving the worst kind of diagnosis, seventy-six year old John Updike immediately begins writing a poem. She vividly portrays Dylan Thomas's extraordinary self-destructive tendencies that culminate in his infamous final collapse at a Greenwich Village tavern. And she shows us how Maurice Sendak's beloved books for children are infused with his lifelong obsession with death, if you know where to look. In each of these glorious creators' final moments, Roiphe finds bravery, suffering, bad behavior, passionate love, peacefulness, bursts of energy, and profound thinking. In a voice that is unsentimental, compassionate, urgent, Roiphe helps us to look boldly at death and be less afraid"--
Reviews with the most likes.
I don't worry about death. I don't think about death. I don't care about death.
Nevertheless, this book is a brilliant book. Whether you care about death or not, whether you care about writers or not, this book will set your little mind a-spinning about life and, yes, death, and meaning and purpose, and love and hate, and all the important things. It's thoroughly researched, full of all the little details and stories that delight and reveal, and it's beautifully written, in solid little chunks, almost like poems.