PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\" A lot of writers put life and death into their work. But for almost four decades, Thomas Lynch has examined what Auden called the \'unmentionable odor of death,\' those details that even the most unflinching writers usually dodge ...Some of his finest, wryest and most stylish essays about the human enterprise of mortality appear together in this collection ... When Lynch takes us into his later struggles with alcoholism and estrangement, you read them as the words of a man who has been bathed from birth to know how easily the gift of life can be rendered into dust ... you will be grateful for these graceful essays, which light up so many of the dark details that are part of what is, after all, the one demographic to which we will all belong.
