Abstract

"I begin to discern the profile of my death." This sentence from Marguerite Yourcenar's novel Memoirs of Hadrian has stuck with me over the decades. In checking the quote, I learned that this sentence from an early draft caught the novelist's attention, and encouraged her to write the book from perspective of the dying Roman emperor. Something of this magic – finding, in one's earlier thoughts, a key that unlocks a story – is at work in F.M. Kamm's Almost Over, a book constructed as a series of rigorous conversations with her own work, that of fellow American philosophers over the past 50 years, and with public policy, aimed at bringing the profile of death into view, considering how mortality shapes the...