Let’s Talk About Death: Asking the Questions That Profoundly Change the Way We Live and Die

The epistolary construction of this book demonstrates by example that death is a subject best approached through dialogue. Coauthors Gordon and Kacandes, respectively a massage therapist and a college professor, present nearly four years of email correspondence on a topic that is, in modern society, often considered taboo. Conversational in tone, their exchanges—which touch on caregiving, medications, and the right to die, among other things—should be more relatable for the average reader than the usual medical or political discourse about these topics. At times, the emails seem to have undergone too much editing after the fact, disrupting the sense of an authentic conversation taking place. The genuine investment of both authors, however, is always evident; readers receive a sense of their personal experiences with mortality throughout, from an opening reference to the unsolved murders of two of Kacandes’s fellow Dartmouth professors in 2001, to her own closing confrontation with cancer. Though this is not the first book to seek for factual information, it warmly meets common end-of-life fears with, at the very least, the reassurance that one is not alone. Agent: Nancy Rosenfeld, AAA Books Unlimited. (Nov.)