Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff

Swimming in a Sea of Death is the account of Susan Sontag’s final months from her diagnosis with leukemia, told from the point of view of his son. It starts with a clueless physician who delivers the diagnosis without, or so it seems, realizing that being told one has a fatal, incurable disease might be [...]

Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg

Home Safe is the story of a sixty-year old writer who loses her husband and her writing inspiration and focuses instead on making her daughter’s life miserable. She starts with innocuous annoyances, like buying her clothes she can’t wear, but graduates to prying into her boyfriends and her life, all under the cover of being [...]

Epilogue by Anne Roiphe

While reading Epilogue I found it hard not to think of The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion since are memoirs of grief-stricken New York intellectual widows. Didion’s book focuses on grief (to me the most vivid description was of how she could not bear to give away her husband’s shoes) while this one [...]

Jane Brody’s Guide to the Great Beyond by Jane Brody

So eery that I decided to read this particular book last week…
Jane Brody’s Guide to the Great Beyond is a sobering and practical guide to how to prepare for our final months and weeks on earth and make things easier and better for us and our families and friends. The book includes a hodge-podge of basic [...]

Goldengrove by Francine Prose

Goldengrove‘ s heroin, at 13, deals with her older sister’s accidental death by dressing like her and going out with her boyfriend. The parents seem overwhelmed and don’t see what’s going on under their noses (not that they really paid attention to the older daughter’s adventures when she was alive, now that I think of [...]

Nothing to be Frightened of by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes is afraid of death. And aging. And he did not get along with his mother — at all. He has read an impressive array of philosophers and philosophers sans le savoir, and he is able to quote and cross-reference their thoughts effortlessly, or so it seems; I want to believe he had dozens of [...]

An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination is a memoir about having a stillborn baby, and it improbably opens with a hilarious misunderstanding, in a French hospital since the parents lived there at the time, of why one may want to speak with a dwarf after suffering such a loss. Ah, the perils of [...]

Apples and Oranges by Marie Brenner

This is an odd book. Apples and oranges recounts the swift but expected death of the author’s brother, who years ago abandoned a law career for an apple orchard in Washington State, but also includes swaths of family history, dating back to the immigrant grandparents and centered on the bad relationship between brother and sister. It [...]

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

It seems disrespecful to diss The Last Lecture, a book written by a father of three young children and professor at CMU who was told he would die shortly of pancreatic cancer (and has since died) and wanted to leave behind a tangible memento to his family. I am told that the actual last lecture, [...]

Final Salute by Jim Sheeler

Prepare for an emotional experience when you read Final Salute, a carefully crafted description of a very tough job, that of the Marines who notify the families of deaths in combat, and who take care of those families through funerals and beyond. Perhaps the members of Congress who voted for the Iraq war should read this [...]