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by: Julian Barnes
List Price: $24.95Amazon.com's Price: $16.47 You Save: $8.48 (34%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780307269638
ISBN: 0307269639
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: September 02, 2008
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: September 02, 2008
Sales Rank: 2832
Studio: Knopf
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Two years after the best-selling Arthur & George, Julian Barnes gives us a memoir on mortality that touches on faith and science and family as well as a rich array of exemplary figures who over the centuries have confronted the same questions he now poses about the most basic fact of life: its inevitable extinction.
If the fear of death is “the most rational thing in the world,” how does one contend with it? An atheist at twenty, an agnostic at sixty, Barnes looks into the various arguments for and against and with God, and at the bloodline whose archivist, following his parents’ death, he has become—another realm of mystery, wherein a drawer of mementos and his own memories (not to mention those of his philosopher brother) often fail to connect. There are other ancestors, too: the writers—“most of them dead, and quite a few of them French”—who are his daily companions, supplemented by composers and theologians and scientists whose similar explorations are woven into this account with an exhilarating breadth of intellect and felicity of spirit.
Deadly serious, masterfully playful, and surprisingly hilarious, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a riveting display of how this supremely gifted writer goes about his business and a highly personal tour of the human condition and what might follow the final diagnosis.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Still Frightened
Although there were interesting issues discussed about death and dying, Barnes also included a great deal of space to his childhood and memories about his parents with no particular relevance to what I thought was his central theme: reflections on death. The book lacked focus and an overall sense of direction. Barnes relied heavily on his own experience with the death of his parents and a number of French writers of the 18th and 19th century who wrote about this subject. In between writing about ... Read More
Rating:  - Truthful, a little rueful.
Julian Barnes is the man I most would like to do lunch with!! Everything he writes is a sardonic conversation between our most cherished delusions and our true nature, whether he is musing on God,as in this book, or fictionalizing what has replaced God in his many novels.There is a kind of innate modesty in his writing that makes his words irresistible.
Rating: - What's There to Like?
The truth is, I did not like this book except where it permitted me to escape its main topic. I am not an embracer of death, nor is Barnes, who hates and fears it, as I do. But he wrote a whole book about it. Are his death obsessions rooted in vanity or cowardice or, golly, mortality? Barnes admits to waking up in the dead of night yelling, "No No NO!" as he dreams of being swallowed up into blackness. And death weaves its way into his entire opus of novels because Barnes has always been obsessed ... Read More
Rating: - Frightened of nothing, indeed
The nothing of which Mr. Barnes is frightened is death, I found out after selecting the book based on the title and the author's photograph on the cover--a tightly framed head shot of a middle-aged man looking directly into the camera with his head slightly turned to the side, with a a faint smile that might signify cool cynicism, a private joke, or a knowing wisdom. I had never read anything by the author before, but found this essay on death deep, readable, and witty, even when I disagreed with ... Read More
Rating: - Ruminations on mortality
"In the midst of life we are in death." Julian Barnes has discarded God and religion, albeit admitting that he misses the certainty that religious faith offers. That makes his thoughts on mortality and death particularly intriguing, especially for others who share his lack of religious conviction or who grapple with questions. Death is the central and inevitable fact of our lives; our fear of confronting it means that works like Barnes's are all-too-rare.
In the hands of a lesser writer, ... Read More
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