The Inevitable: Summary and book reviews of The Inevitable by David Shields, plus links to an excerpt from The Inevitable and a biography of David Shields.

What is death and how does it touch upon life? Twenty writers look for answers. Birth is not inevitable. Life certainly isn't. The sole inevitability of existence, the only sure consequence of being alive, is death. In these eloquent and surprising essays, twenty writers face this fact, among them Geoff Dyer, who describes the ghost bikes memorializing those who die in biking accidents; Jonathan Safran Foer, proposing a new way of punctuating dialogue in the face of a family history of heart attacks and decimation by the Holocaust; Mark Doty, whose reflections on the art-porn movie Bijou lead to a meditation on the intersection of sex and death epitomized by the AIDS epidemic; and Joyce Carol Oates, who writes about the loss of her husband and faces her own mortality. Other contributors include Annie Dillard, Diane Ackerman, Peter Straub, and Brenda Hillman.

BookBrowse

Editors David Shields and Bradford Morrow have put together a heavy but thoroughly interesting collection of essays in The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death. I was genuinely surprised by the uniqueness of the authors' experiences of death; it is encountered in an array of different ways, is interpreted differently, and means different things to people of varying cultures. That element - that intriguing difference - is what I found most compelling about this collection. Death is the one and only thing that all living beings have in common, and yet it is so personal. The level of thinking and, moreover, the level of writing in this collection is excellent...  (Reviewed by Elena Spagnolie).

Full Review (709 words).

Media Reviews

Publishers Weekly Often poetic and at times funny or gruesome while exposing raw grief, the writers...tackle the subject of death with honesty and courage.   Kirkus Reviews Starred Review. A wonderfully speculative patchwork quilt on the meaning of life and death.   Library Journal [P]oignant, heartfelt essays...[S]eriously considered, highly literate analyses...raise the bar for more philosophical readers searching for alternatives to age-old traditions perpetuated in religious dogma.

Recent Reader Reviews

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