In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger Review

In June 2020 Sebastian Junger nearly died from a massive haemorrhage in his abdomen - and also saw his dead father floating in the void next to him, urging him onto the next plane of existence! But that was just a hallucination brought about by massive blood loss - right?

Junger’s latest book, In My Time of Dying, is an account of his recent near-death experience as well as an extended ponderation on the possibility of an afterlife. Parts of it were interesting, others weren’t, and overall I didn’t find it as compelling as other books of his I’ve read like War and Tribe but it wasn’t a bad read.

The book is divided into two parts - What and If. In What, he mostly covers his harrowing near death and how damn lucky he was to have certain circumstances align, in the unlikeliest of ways, to give him the chance he needed to stay alive. It’s generally enthralling although Junger has definitely done his research - extensively interviewing the doctors who saved his life - so at times it reads like a medical textbook, which is as exciting as it sounds!

To base an entire book about the experience though is asking a lot so Junger goes on numerous tangents throughout to fill it out. The flashbacks to his own past - the pages in italics - were quite uninteresting, but when he went off on recounting factoids on how the venous catheter was invented, an esoteric background detail on a minor character in Moby Dick, or his familial connections to the theoretical physicists of the early 20th century, like Schrodinger, the book was much more compelling.

The second part of the book, If, gets a bit repetitive as Junger recounts one near-death account after another (they all saw something weird) and ultimately his conclusions are neither original or insightful to the subject. His contemplations on how strange existence and the universe is, not to mention the human brain, and how an afterlife would be one of the least bizarre things to be real when contemplating it all is worth keeping in mind. I’m not a religious man but for someone to say definitively that anyone choosing to believe in an afterlife is foolish is equally so themselves.

In My Time of Dying is a meandering pseudo-narrative on the big questions we’ll all have to face at least once in our lives. Occasionally it was riveting, other times it was dry and dull - Junger’s written better, more focused and powerful books like War and Tribe. I didn’t dislike it but found In My Time of Dying to be easy to put down, despite its brevity. Not a must-read for all but might be worth a look if you’re interested in the subject/author.