THE THING ABOUT LIFE IS THAT ONE DAY YOU'LL BE DEAD by David Shields

Here's yet another piece of 'creative nonfiction' that promises much and delivers too little. This one should've been subtitled A Desultory Memoir of My Incredibly Boring Life, Plus a Lotta Stuff (But Nowhere Near Enough) About My Very Interesting Father, Plus Many Pages of Random Statistics I Found on Wikipedia... I don't think many readers are 'hungering' for the 'reality' Shields dishes out here. It's a bland and tasteless confection, a cake baked with sawdust. If mediocrity had an odor, it would smell like this book. Shields's prose is a slick, competent and utterly undistinguished upmarket journalese; he seems to think he's the new Montaigne, but he writes like a contributor to Vanity Fair. And this short but padded monument to his vanity is anything but fair. Time spent reading this book is time wasted, and since time is money (for the purposes of argument let's say time costs $20 per hour), I calculate that David Shields owes me $160. I don't expect a check.

I mourn the trees that died to produce this book.
I mourn the bugs that lived in the bark of the trees that died to produce this book.
I mourn the woodpecker that would have fed on the bugs that lived in the bark of the trees that died to produce this book.
I mourn the cat that would've eaten the woodpecker fattened by the bugs that lived in the bark of the trees that died to produce this book.
I mourn the hawk that would've eaten the cat that would've eaten the woodpecker fattened by the bugs that lived in the bark of the trees that died to produce this book...

You get the picture.

David Shields's work provides no compensation for the micro-havoc it has wreaked on some fragile ecosystem.