Last Breath: Cautionary tales from the limits of human endurance by Peter
Stark, Macmillan, £16.99, ISBN 0333905709
“MEDITATION on inevitable death should be performed daily,” wrote the
18th-century samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo. “Every day one should meditate on being
carried away by surging waves, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of
disease.” Such acceptance of our mortality has largely been lost in a society
where death is customarily hidden behind hospital curtains. But not in Last
Breath.
Like a modern-day samurai, Stark ponders a series of fatal or near-fatal
fictional scenarios. Death prowls each chapter in a different incarnation, from
burial by…
