to be put off by its heavy and, at times, even morbid reflections on death. Conscious of at least some of the factors that caused it, we should be sympathetic toward the author’s attempt to calm his reader’s deepest fears and find in his words an invitation to ponder our own mortality. For many in today’s world, the reality of war, natural disasters, and diseases such as AIDS have brought the threshold of death much closer to the surface of their thoughts and have made them conscious of how so much