Here at Words on Books HQ we review books from time to time. Usually at the wrong time, well after publication.

Publishers like to have their authors interviewed and their books mentioned, flagged, reviewed, discussed, dissed or praised weeks before publication. Anticipation builds, print runs are adjusted up or down, and by the time the book arrives in bookstores there's a line around the block waiting for the store to open. Or so they hope.

By the time I get around to a book, like the one I'm reading this week, the publicity window has banged shut like a fire truck door. The publicity team long since moved on to another batch of forthcoming books.

Six months from now there will be some additional noise about the paperback edition, but there's less money in paperbacks, and therefore less promotion for them. The long standing irony is that by the time a book has been for sale a few weeks it's already an orphan. Unless Oprah chooses it for her book club, but that's another story.

I picked up David Shields' book The Thing about Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead because it was highly recommended by a bookseller friend of mine. She wrote, "I think I can confidently promise that this is like nothing you've ever read. Call it memoir, call it philosophy -- it's haunting, funny and starkly honest about the central fact of life. I loved every page."

Life AND Death? Bookseller's personal recommendation? How could this book miss? It's actually like a lot of books I've read, but this time all in one place. It's biography and autobiography, a tribute to an aging father, and a remarkable review of current biological science.

Science like this: By the age of seven a human has peaked and is already on the downside of life. That's according to actuaries, and they should know. The fetus battles its mother for nutrients, a tug of war in which both sides struggle but the rope barely moves. You're born with 350 bones, but when you're grown you will have 144 fewer. As you age you're increasingly unlikely to develop cancer: "The tissues of an old person don't serve the needs of aggressive, energy-hungry tumors," Shields writes.

Then there are the memoir moments: "I remember once being complimented by my mother for not entering a playground when the gate was locked and my father being disgusted that I hadn't climbed the fence."

The Thing about Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead blithely jumps from the intensely personal to the coldly scientific, and back again.

And the quotations. There are many, scattered liberally throughout. In a discussion of sex and death Shields quotes Thackeray: "When one is twenty, yes, but at forty-seven Venus may rise from the sea and I for one should hardly put on my spectacles to have a look."

All of this varied content is delivered in a breezy, almost flippant succession of factoids, deep thoughts and bon mots.

It's difficult to predict what any particular reader will make of the book with the unwieldy title. It could be enjoyed as a pop science reference, a quotation book, or memoir in progress.

And, as if we males needed further reminding, this last thought, a favorite of both Shields senior and junior, from Charles de Gaulle: "The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men."

Aired Sunday July 20, 2008 at 10:55 am and Wednesday July 23, 2008 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

The Thing about Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead by David Shields. Knopf hardcover $23.95. ISBN 9780307268044.

The paperback edition is due in February, 2009.

Is there ANY living writer without a web site? http://www.davidshields.com/

My favorite bookseller is Christie Olson Day. Her recommendations: http://www.gallerybookshop.com/favframe.htm

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A reply from author David Shields:

Wednesday April 9, 2008

The Thing About Life has received hundreds of laudatory reviews from magazines, newspapers, websites, bloggers, readersí reviews, but inevitably there have been a handful of naysayers. The book aspires to be (ultimately, deeply) consoling, but until it arrives there it's formally, emotionally, and intellectually unnerving, nervous-making. What interests me about the naysayers is their antipathy to this level of discomfort. That is, the few negative reviews have come from people who are, it seems to me, uncomfortable with the degree of ambivalence I acknowledge feeling toward my father -- the blend of "filial love and Oedipal rage," as a generous review in Time put it -- and they also resist the book's boundary-blurring: the convergence of data stream, wisdom stream, and father-and-son stream. Content, though, tests form: a work should look like what it's. about. And life, friends (as John McCain would say), is nothing if not messy. Death, too.

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