Clive James has been close to death for several years, and he has written about the experience in a series of deeply moving poems. In Sentenced to Life, he was

Traces the experiences of a Holocaust survivor whose wartime sufferings and painful memories bring him face to face with the temptations of evil.

"In this category-defying book, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects: death. She examines the final days

Pretentiousness is the engine oil of culture; the essential lubricant in the development of all arts, high, low, or middle.