Barbarians and Lucid Dying

Two books that have nothing in common turn out to argue the same case: a resuscitation doctor's research into near-death experience, and a surfer's forty-year chase after a wave that never quite let him go. Reading Sam Parnia's Lucid Dying against William Finnegan's Barbarian Days — from a rented apartment above San Francisco's Ocean Beach, burned out on a decade of tech conferences — I found the same lesson twice. Attention, paid all the way to the edge, is the whole technology of living and dying well.