variety, and compression, the essays in this collection tell us what it is like in the early years of the twenty-first century to experience, or to witness, the end of life. As the saying goes, no one who has been there has come back to tell the tale, but the dying appear as characters in many of these pieces, so well rendered that we do get a sense of what their last days, if not the last moments, were like for them.

Obviously, the voices we hear are the voices of the living, of men and women who have survived the deaths of parents and partners and children. We hear, too, from health professionals, doctors, counselors, hospice workers, nurses, a nursing home worker, and an EMT dispatcher, people forthe time we have reached the end of the book—how important we feel it is to listen to the dying and to those who remain. Many of these narratives feel like messages in bottles, washed up on the shore—urgent communications whose authors hope they will reach the land of the healthy and the living. The result is impressive, and we can only feel grateful for having experienced the intensity and the sheer amount of life that has been compressed and contained in a book about its end.

Francine Prose is the author of many best-selling books, including A Changed Man, Reading Like a Writer, and Blue Angel, which was a National Book Award finalist. Her newest nonfiction book is Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife.

To Morning

ANNE JACOBSON

Anne