Junger takes us on what may be the wildest and most frightening ride of his career ... Junger’s experience, and the vast amount of reporting he brings to near-death experiences (NDEs), could easily set off a cacophony of screams in academic medicine.
This is a moving, compact, philosophically ambitious, theological and scientific meditation of raw honesty and a necessary endeavour at a time when atheist materialism verges on hegemony among intellectuals in western society.
Gripping ... Some of the subatomic stuff is inevitably harder to digest than the hospital drama, but it remains compelling in Junger’s hands. I found his search for the nature and meaning of death – an atheist’s open-minded grappling with the unknowable – to be at once reassuring and troubling.
At its best, In My Time of Dying is Mr. Junger as pure "meaning junkie": He attempts to wrestle with both the totality of his many near-death experiences and the potential that, in those liminal moments, we may apprehend a reality (we might even call it an afterlife) that transcends our human understanding ... It is painful, visceral reading. Mr. Junger’s prose doesn’t simply bring home the immediacy of his own averted death; it demands we anticipate our own demise ... At times, In My Time of Dying risks being little more than a book-length memento mori.
