A review by lubinka
A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last by Stephen Levine

2.0

I'm sure that many people found solace in this book, but for me it was too abstract, and most of the author's "insights" were rather meaningless to me. Its all too poetic language failed to convey a more practical way for the reader (well, at least for me) to deal with the matter at hand. He and his family supposedly decided to live a year as if it's their last, and after a year of contemplating their lives in a rather general manner (ok, seeking and giving forgiveness and preparing themselves not to be "constipated by grief"), the year was over, with them - and us - none the wiser.

Sadly most people need to really be dying in order for them to be able to finally face their mortality, and this exercise in re-living your life as if in a retrospective was not able to make me really feel the anguish of death, or find the deliverance from said anguish. Even the praised "soft belly" meditation was just plain words to me. The second star is added simply for the fact that it made me think of this subject at all.

I suppose I'll die totally unprepared. Tough shit.