My Brother Death

This remarkable book by the distinguished journalist Cyrus Sulzberger is in a modern sense comparable to Burton's famous The Anatomy of Melancholy. My Brother Death is a thoughtful and finely written effort to discern just what death is, to define both it and its relationship to man, to discuss how to meet its inevitable approach and what may lie beyond. To accomplish this purpose Mr. Sulzberger draws heavily from the history of human thought and experience, from all the principal religions of East and West; from the philosophers, saints, kings and heroes who one by one have crossed to the unknown. He documents and dramatizes the entire panorama of the ways in which men die: by acts curiously attributed to the God of disaster, pestilence, famine and illness; by man's own hand in murder, war, cannibalism, capital punishment and religious persecution. How does death approach and how and why do the brave best prepare to meet it? Not only does the author introduce the reader to the reflections of outstanding men upon their final des tiny; he himself has spent many years contemplating this problem which is everyone's secret concern. He has personally investigated death on many battlefields and on all seven continents of this earth. By these investigations and by his own deep study of history, philosophy and the dimly remembered customs of our atavistic past, he has assembled a fascinating and, in a sense, comforting picture of human courage, a courage that triumphs over human evil. This sad but lovely tale of eternity and our own role in its embrace begins appropriately on a happy little Greek island. It ends there, aeons later, among "the soft Aegean waters that bear me northward and backward into time."