OnlineBookClub.org

[Following is an official OnlineBookClub.org review of "The Dying Teach Us How to Live" by Patricia M. Acker, Author and Illustrator.]

The title of The Dying Teach Us How to Live - Tender Stories of Faith, Hope, Love, Angels, and Near-Death Experiences suggests this is a book about how to live your life better based on the experience of the terminally ill. It’ not. A more fitting title would be “How to See Death as A Beautiful Part of Life”.

The author, Patricia M. Acker MS, LSW, worked 17 years as a hospice social worker with the dying and their families. This book is her way of sharing what she learned while listening to their “final thoughts, feelings and faith”. This is a very tender topic that I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking about, and it’s with regret that I say that while this book has a deeply meaningful message, that message gets weakened by messy structure, lack of editing and extensive telling-not-showing.

Let’s talk about the structure first. The book is sort of divided into parts (but not edited so) based on themes. Most of the text is short stories of people dying, mostly peacefully, and each story is followed by a short blurb of what’s to learn from the story. Sometimes the author also writes a chapter about her own feelings and thoughts. The problem is, everything seems like it’s just thrown there. Looking at the Table of Contents gives no clear idea of what’s to come. Strong structural editing would have helped.

The same missing editing shows in clumsy ways of saying things (“It was not able to be explained medically”) and not dividing dialogue in paragraphs based on who’s speaking. It makes the text harder to read and understand.

The readability problems continue in how the short stories are written. There’s almost two hundred stories in the book, and each one has different people portrayed. For example, the first five rows of “The Cell Phone Miracle” introduce eight new characters! It’s really difficult to keep up with all of them, especially when the next story three pages later again introduces all new people. And on and on, two hundred times. If each story has four characters on average, that makes roughly eight hundred characters throughout the book. It’s a bit much.

This leads to the problem of telling-not-showing. While it’s understandable that with this amount of stories and people it’s difficult to add meat to them, a big issue is how the author tells her opinion about the qualities of a person: “Tracy is a beautiful, kind, caring person who had compassion for others in the assisted living. She is the role model of a wife, mother and soul mate.” I would prefer the author showing Tracy’s behavior so I can make my own conclusions about her character. It also makes the writing unnecessarily flat when almost everyone is as one-dimensionally good as Tracy, often described with the exact same words.

One feature that the reader will probably either hate or love is the blurb after every story - they are very religious. As an example, after a story about making up with a sister after decades of not speaking: “God loves us and accepts us the way we are. He wants us to forgive and be forgiven.”

I like best the chapters where the author shares her own insight into what she’s learned. They are very few and far between. I think the book would have been better with more of the author’s wisdom and fewer more focused stories to support and illustrate it.

I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars. One star is added for the underlying transformative message and obvious deep caring. One star is taken for messy structure, another for the other readability problems. If you're ready to think about life and death issues, find Christian religious blurbs inspiring and don’t mind structure and readability problems, you’ll enjoy this book.

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The Dying Teach Us How to Live
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Like pilvi's review? Post a comment saying so!

I think you've done an amazing job on a review that must have been difficult to write - it must be difficult to be critical of someone who genuinely feels they have a transformative message to communicate. On the other hand, you can see that the format - all those vignettes of one-dimensional characters - has challenges that would faze even the most skilled professional writer.

When I saw the title, I was intrigued. When we are faced with death, that seems to be when we begin to look at life. Time seems shorter and our goals may seem not achieved. I, like you, prefer a book to show me the person’s character versus tell me. This can easily be done through dialogue, and this would also lend way to have the author interject herself into the situation more. Maybe the inspirational quotes serve to quell fear because ALOT of people fear the final curtain call. So, maybe the author needs to go back and redo a few things to make this one more readable.

This book tends to present strong messages, but not in the right way. I'm not fond of such a book where you get confused with the characteers, the message it want's to give or the other gramatical mistaket.
Your review is great though!!!

Too many characters are an immediate turn-off to me. I don't like being bogged down that way. It's nice you were able to pinpoint so much of what was lacking in this book. I'm sorry it wasn't what you were hoping to find, but thank you for an informative review.

Death for most persons signifies, sadness, despair, and facing one's own mortality, etc. The author of this book has however done her best to present a more uplifting aspect to this topic. It is too bad, however, that it is so difficult to read. Thank you for your very detailed review.