MixedWashington Independent Review of BooksTreat the subject with overwrought earnestness and risk alienating your readers. Treat the subject with glib insensitivity and risk losing sight of its human cost. What’s remarkable is that Suicidal mostly succeeds in walking that line. Bering, trained as a psychologist, offers readers a fascinating amalgam of disciplinary knowledge and diverse source material. He draws on research studies from evolutionary psychology and animal behavior, along with interviews, historical records, and literary accounts ... Suicidal excels at extracting...juicy, intriguing detail from a range of fields and artifacts ... The author’s eclectic, stylized approach doesn’t always work. Some passages intended as humorous come off as rambling instead ... Tone-wise, there are more serious missteps. Bering sometimes relishes clever wordplay at the expense of human feeling ... I hesitate to recommend this book to readers who have been affected by suicide in such an intimate way. Because Bering approaches the topic with detachment and occasional levity, Suicidal seems to better suit curious onlookers, or at least readers who have a healthy distance from suicidal thoughts or events. Still, Suicidal is an original, if flawed, contribution to our often-simplistic popular narratives about killing oneself. Its value lies in acknowledging readers’ latent curiosity about suicide, while also bringing nuance—and a surprising measure of playfulness— to such a charged and solemn subject.
