Reviews and Notes: How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter

Sherwin B. Nuland. 278 pages. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1994. $24.00.

Graphic description, hyperbole, and poetic nuance are combined in this book to rub the reader's nose in the gore, smell, wet-stickiness, and mess of the final moments of life. I remember Jim Vetter, pediatrician at the Marshfield Clinic early in the 1960s, smashing a doll to bits in a frenzy at the appropriate moment in his pioneering lectures on child abuse: head, …