"In the midst of life we are in death." Julian Barnes has discarded God and religion, albeit admitting that he misses the certainty that religious faith offers. That makes his thoughts on mortality and death particularly intriguing, especially for others who share his lack of religious conviction or who grapple with questions. Death is the central and inevitable fact of our lives; our fear of confronting it means that works like Barnes's are all-too-rare.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have become a tedious and self-indulgent exercise. But Barnes blends memoir, literary reflections and personal philosophy to produce a series of extended essays that should prod the most reluctant baby boomer to re-examine their lives. Ultimately, the value of this eloquent book lies not only in Barnes's own insights about death and life, but in the way that it spurs readers to define for themselves what makes a well-lived life.

Should be mandatory reading for everyoone over the age of 40. And now I'm going back to read some other Barnes, after rediscovery the delights of his prose style and agile intellect.

The nothing of which Mr. Barnes is frightened is death, I found out after selecting the book based on the title and the author's photograph on the cover--a tightly framed head shot of a middle-aged man looking directly into the camera with his head slightly turned to the side, with a a faint smile that might signify cool cynicism, a private joke, or a knowing wisdom. I had never read anything by the author before, but found this essay on death deep, readable, and witty, even when I disagreed with him.

Barnes, it turns out, is a British writer (so his wit is by turns subtle, ironic, and scathing) who is an agnostic obsessed with death--as a philosophical subject, of his parents, of famous writers, and more personally, his own. He is often awakened by dreams of death, and faces his fears from the standpoint of a humanist evolutionist unable to believe, but yet, professes that "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him," a profession his atheist philosopher brother finds "soppy."

Despite it all, Barnes still approaches the subject with good humor and consideration that he might be ("hopes to be" would be overstating the case) wrong. Quoting Isaac Bashevis Singer on immortality, "If survival has been arranged, you will have no choice in the matter.", Barnes turns to the camera with that wry smile and ripostes "The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing." (p. 65)

I don't agree with Mr. Barnes, approaching the subject as a believer, a Christian secure in the belief that the Bible describes first the certainty of eternal life after death, and then the path to enjoying that eternal life in the presence of God. I say this not in an attempt to proselytize, antagonize, or criticize agnostics like Barnes or atheists less friendly to my spiritual belief, but merely to preface my awareness that accepting God's existence and salvation is essentially a closed system; one either believes in God, the Bible, and the plan of salvation, and are thus convinced of immortality, or one does not, in which case all bets are off and one is left to approach death either in abject fear, resolute denial, or as Barnes has done, with insightful examination of the complete bundle of human emotions the subject arouses.

I do wish that I could do a better job through the quiet testimony of my life in revealing the existence and presence of God and the ability to face death with certainty; instead, as Barnes says "My agnostic and atheistic friends are indistinguishable from my professedly religious ones in honesty, generosity, integrity and fidelity--or their opposites." (p. 117) That is a sad commentary that my spiritual maturity and that of the Christian community is not what it should be.

In any case, any reader whether Christian, agnostic, or atheist who approaches Barnes with an open mind will find plenty to ponder and enjoy here.

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 death and dying, he would bring up an incident from his youth (for example) when he was pushed by his brother on tricycle into a wall and how different people had different memories of what actually happened. This occurred a number of times and always left me puzzled as to why it was included in the book. Did he not have an editor to keep him on task? I can't really recommend this book and in the end it left me still frightened.