Last Breath: Cautionary tales from the limits of human endurance by Peter
Stark, Macmillan, 拢16.99, ISBN 0333905709
鈥淢EDITATION on inevitable death should be performed daily,鈥� wrote the
18th-century samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo. 鈥淓very day one should meditate on being
carried away by surging waves, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of
disease.鈥� Such acceptance of our mortality has largely been lost in a society
where death is customarily hidden behind hospital curtains. But not in Last
Breath.
Like a modern-day samurai, Stark ponders a series of fatal or near-fatal
fictional scenarios. Death prowls each chapter in a different incarnation, from
burial by avalanche to heatstroke. The tales are interwoven with the physiology
involved and the often surprising prevalence of each fate. A staggering 2
million sailors, for example, died from scurvy between 1500 and 1800.
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The fiction slips past smoothly鈥攁 spoonful of sugar to help the dark
medicine go down. What might have been dramatic reconstructions in the style of
reality TV鈥擶hen box jellyfish attack鈥攂ecomes something more
profound. Drawing on sources such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Sufi
poetry, Stark explores the motivation of those who still choose to push the
limits in our cosseted world.