Uncontrollable. One of my favorite personal foibles involves living under the delusion that I have some control over my life. In a book titled, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, Barbara Ehrenreich explores how our lives and journey toward death are uncontrollable, down to the cellular level, and the extraordinary means taken by medical practitioners to prolong life are often not based in scientific evidence. Ehrenreich faces the certainty of her death with confidence and describes her decision to abandon preventive and diagnostic medical procedures now that she has reached an age (mid-seventies) when death is more probable than long life. Supported by her PhD in cell biology, she uses a long section of this short book to explore how cells behave and misbehave. Readers beyond middle age think about quality of life and certainty of death, or we should, and Ehrenreich may not provide answers to our questions, but she stimulates thinking about what we can control and how much is far beyond anyone’s control.
Rating: Four-star (I like it)
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Natural Causes from amazon.com.
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