As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about loss and death and grief, I found this book extraordinary.”
—Anderson Cooper
“Let me start this way: I believe that Sebastian Junger is one of the finest writers of our generation. In My Time of Dying is a stunning book about life, about death, about the afterlife. These are subjects all of us should want to spend days, months, years thinking about. But we don’t do that. Why? Probably because the subject overwhelms most of us. And maybe because the human condition scares the hell out of all of us. Well, Sebastian Junger has just done the hard work for us. In My Time of Dying examines the often subtle connections between life, death, and the after-life. Junger has clearly obsessed about his subject. The result is a powerful book that comes as close as anything I’ve read in explaining what it means to be human.”
—James Patterson
“Sebastian Junger is known for standing on the front lines in places that scare the hell out of the rest of us. Nowhere is that truer than in In My Time of Dying, where he turns inward to examine his own mortality, the most frightening—yet fascinating—frontier there is.”
—Caitlin Doughty, New York Times bestselling author of Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory
“Sebastian Junger, a virtuoso of narrative nonfiction, has conjured his most personal and yet universal book, a stunning account I didn’t so much read as inhale, awed and riveted and forever changed.”
—Michael Finkel, New York Times bestselling author of The Art Thief
"In books like The Perfect Storm and War, Sebastian Junger transported readers to perilous worlds most would never actually visit for themselves. Now, with this tour de force, Junger takes his readers on a more personal journey and to a far more ordinary place—a place where, at one moment, we might be clearing brush at a country cabin and spending a quiet moment with our partner and, at the next, bleeding to death in the back of an ambulance from an invisible wound. Having come within mere minutes of not surviving a ruptured pancreatic artery, Junger has returned to masterfully braid together a discussion of family, near-death experiences, quantum physics, and the miracle of modern medicine. With this soon-to-be classic, Junger has crafted an ode to the magical healing power of love and the wonder of life.”
—David R. Dow, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and author of Things I’ve Learned from Dying: A Book About Life
“In My Time of Dying is written by one of our greatest reporters, who found himself at the brink of death and came back with the story of his life—and ours. Combining elements of a heart-pounding medical thriller with brilliantly clear science-writing, Sebastian Junger has written a tour-de-force about the biggest mystery we all face. With stories from war, medicine, history, and everyday life woven throughout, this is an instant classic that filled me with wonder, gratitude, and awe. It belongs in the company of Atul Guwande’s Being Mortal and Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die, but goes one step further, helping us imagine what if anything might await us on the other side of the great divide.”
—Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club
“A terrifically detailed medical thriller, as suspenseful and pacy as an episode of peak-era ER.”
—Simon Usborne, The Guardian
“Extraordinary...what Junger has given us is perhaps the first of its kind: a report by a journalist about his own death”
—Ryan D’Agostino, Men’s Health
"Written with Junger’s usual combination of intelligent reporting and flashes of poetry, this riveting, inspiring volume is an intimate and powerful work sure to prompt reflections in anyone who reads it."
—Michael Hainey, Air Mail
“Braids a journalist’s best efforts at answers with a sexagenarian’s complicated acceptance of the inevitable.”
—Elisabeth Egan, The New York Times Book Review
"Can we prove an afterlife exists? No. Might one exist? Junger gives us reason to believe in that possibility. In any case, how lucky we are that Junger survived, and that we’re able to join him on another mind-blowing adventure—this time to a place all of us will one day visit."
—Steven Petrow, The Washington Post
“Nothing short of wonderful and stimulating.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A riveting and resonant meditation on some of life’s biggest questions.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Few other writers have such passion for granular detail, intellectual heft and boundless curiosity...For all Junger’s firework display of ideas, this is an oddly reassuring book, especially for those lacking the consolation of religious belief."
—Janice Turner, The Times (UK)
"Ardently researched, consummately written, and boldly forthright, this an intensely moving and deeply provocative immersion.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“A luminous book...Intelligent and poignantly probing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Haunting...Junger brings the meticulousness of his earlier career to this most personal event.”
—Erica Wagner, The New Statesman
“Junger’s book is excellent at jolting us out of a complacent attitude towards death. Partly because it recounts how suddenly a seemingly healthy adult—a strong, fit, and worldly-wise man—can find himself laid low by an almost fatal illness or injury."
—Ayaan Hirsi Ali, National Review
“An impressive mix of faith, science, and reason that charts the marvels of the universe and the place in it we have attained against all logical odds.”
—Jerod Ra'Del Hollyfield, The Pamphleteer (Nashville)
What binds listeners to this absorbing memoir is the compelling question provoked by the author's near-death experience: What happens to us after our physical bodies die? The author spends most of this audio detailing the high-risk treatments he received for a nasty aneurysm, describing the commonalities of near-death experiences, and reviewing what science can and cannot tell us about the afterlife. Junger's storytelling is notable for its evocative imagery and the visceral authenticity of his lyrical writing. The author's fully present performance, along with his handsome vocal tone and amiable phrasing, makes his narration a perfect vehicle for this kind of memoir, a satisfying way to hear how Junger's crisis changed his views on life and what's beyond it. This and his palpable wonder and vulnerability make this an absorbing and possibly life-changing audiobook. T.W. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
2024-03-14
A distinguished author and filmmaker reflects on how a near-fatal emergency caused him to rethink the relationship between life and death.
Throughout his life, Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and other acclaimed books, courted injury—and his own untimely demise—through high-risk activities like surfing and work as a climber for tree service companies and, later, a war correspondent. Intellectually, he always understood that “death is the ultimate consequence [and] reality” that gives human existence meaning. However, it was not until he almost lost his life to a pancreatic aneurysm, caused by an undiagnosed case of median arcuate ligament syndrome, that his understanding became more viscerally meaningful. By that time, Junger, then in his late 50s, had settled into a more quiet life with his second wife and two small daughters. One morning, sudden abdominal pain “different from any pain I’d ever known” ripped through his body and then continued on and off until the day “the floor reeled away from me as if I were standing on the deck of a ship” and he could not walk unassisted. At the hospital, doctors first thought that he had ruptured his aorta. They later pinpointed the problem as pancreatic, all while Junger lost blood and cycled in and out of consciousness. Just as he felt himself being “pulled…sternly into the darkness,” he saw his dead physicist father. Haunted by the visitation, Junger researched near-death experiences in the period after his recovery, and this luminous book is the result. The “answers” he found at the intersection of religion, philosophy, and science—that human consciousness may be woven “in the very nature” of matter that can never be fully known—intrigued him, but they also made him even more grateful for the love that bound him to the living and the dead.
Intelligent and poignantly probing.
