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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780307269638
ISBN: 0307269639
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: September 02, 2008
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: September 02, 2008
Sales Rank: 275
Studio: Knopf
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Two years after the best-selling Arthur & George, Julian Barnes gives us a memoir on mortality that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction.
If the fear of death is “the most rational thing in the world,” how does one contend with it? An atheist at twenty, an agnostic at sixty, Barnes looks into the various arguments for and against and with God, and at the bloodline whose archivist, following his parents’ death, he has become—another realm of mystery, wherein a drawer of mementos and his own memories (not to mention those of his philosopher brother) often fail to connect. There are other ancestors, too: the writers—“most of them dead, and quite a few of them French”—who are his daily companions, supplemented by composers and theologians and scientists whose similar explorations are woven into this account with an exhilarating breadth of intellect and felicity of spirit.
Deadly serious, masterfully playful, and surprisingly hilarious, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a riveting display of how this supremely gifted writer goes about his business and a highly personal tour of the human condition and what might follow the final diagnosis.
Customer Reviews Average Rating: 
Rating: - Always interesting but did not quite fit together....
Barnes is bright, entertaining, reflective, and knowledgable and all those positives come together in this discursive treatise on death and many other not totally aligned subjects. I enjoyed my time with him but I kept expecting just a little bit more insight into the main subject: death or rather the fear of death and dying. And yet...I did feel a bit better after finishing the book.Less alone?More aware of the fact that many other people share the same fear? And that many other people have ... Read More
Rating:  - CONCISION
I'm an off and on again admirer of Mr. Barnes' work, having become smitten with "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" and then befuddled by "The Porcupine" (yes, the problem is clearly mine, not his).But in "Nothing to be frightened of" Barnes finds a compelling form for the application of his encyclopedic knowledge of literature and life. Great fiction, of course, gets harder and harder to invent as the volumes and ideas pile up. What Barnes does here is to reintroduce the personal essay ... Read More
Rating:  - Still Frightened
Although there were interesting issues discussed about death and dying, Barnes also included a great deal of space to his childhood and memories about his parents with no particular relevance to what I thought was his central theme: reflections on death.The book lacked focus and an overall sense of direction. Barnes relied heavily on his own experience with the death of his parents and a number of French writers of the 18th and 19th century who wrote about this subject. In between writing about ... Read More
Rating: - Truthful, a little rueful.
Julian Barnes is the man I most would like to do lunch with!! Everything he writes is a sardonic conversation between our most cherished delusions and our true nature, whether he is musing on God,as in this book, or fictionalizing what has replaced God in his many novels.There is a kind of innate modesty in his writing that makes his words irresistible.
Rating: - What's There to Like?
The truth is, I did not like this book except where it permitted me to escape its main topic. I am not an embracer of death, nor is Barnes, who hates and fears it, as I do. But he wrote a whole book about it. Are his death obsessions rooted in vanity or cowardice or, golly, mortality? Barnes admits to waking up in the dead of night yelling, "No No NO!" as he dreams of being swallowed up into blackness. And death weaves its way into his entire opus of novels because Barnes has always been obsessed ... Read More
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