"Shields is a sharp-eyed, self-deprecating, at times hilarious writer."

--The Wall Street Journal

"Mix equal parts of anatomy and autobiography, science and self-disclosure, physiology and family history; shake, stir, add dashes of miscellany, pinches of borrowed wisdom, simmer over a low-grade fever of mortality, and a terrible beauty of a book is born."

--The Boston Globe

"An edifying, wise, unclassifiable mixture of filial love and Oedipal rage."

--Time

"A primer on aging and death for those who take theirs without the sugar.... There's a comfort to be found in this sober investigation of mortality, in Shields's clear-eyed look at the ways in which we come undone."

--Esquire

"Enthralling . . . Fascinating . . . Ultimately, the humanity of Shields' interior and exterior exploration is what makes The Thing About Life--and life itself--worthwhile."

--The San Francisco Chronicle

"Shields undergoes his midlife crisis and comes out the other side-more accessible than ever before, more tender, 'nicer.' And yet The Thing About Life adroitly sidesteps sentimentality-very hard to do when the core of it is a son's love for his cranky, tenacious, irascible, geriatric, Jewish father. I love this book."

--David Guterson

"[An] informative and occasionally unsettling meditation on [Shields's] own aging body and his [97-year-old] nonagenarian father's seemingly endless vigor and strength . . . He writes with great candor about the vitality of his father. . . Also woven into the text are clever quotes on matters corporeal from the likes of Wordsworth, Wittgenstein, Woody Allen, and Martha Graham. Shields's memoir is a sobering, at times poignant, reminder that none of us gets out of this life alive."

--Booklist

"David Shields has accomplished something here so pure and wide in its implications that I think of it almost as a secular, unsentimental Kahlil Gibran: a textbook for the acceptance of our fate on earth."

--Jonathan Lethem

"It's a bold writer who dares to tackle head-on the subject of what it means to be human-something that David Shields does with an extraordinary mixture of tenderness, humor, and inexhaustible curiosity."

--Jonathan Raban

"The Thing About Life grabbed me from the start. It's extremely compelling, gorgeous in many places. I loved it. And I wish I had written it."

--Lauren Slater