An Evening with Sebastian Junger

The Book Stall is thrilled to host New York Times bestselling author Sebastian Junger at the store for a discussion featuring his new book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery. A near-fatal health emergency leads to this powerful reflection on death—and what might follow—by the bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm.

This is a ticketed program. The ticket price includes a copy of the book, and options include a ticket that admits two people (with one book) or one person with one book. Sebastian Junger will be signing his books following the talk!

More About the Book: For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.

This experience spurred Junger—a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical—to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?

Bestselling author James Patterson says, "Let me start this way: I believe that Sebastian Junger is one of the finest writers of our generation. In My Time of Dying is a stunning book about life, about death, about the afterlife. These are subjects all of us should want to spend days, months, years thinking about. But we don't do that. Why? Probably because the subject overwhelms most of us. And maybe because the human condition scares the hell out of all of us. Well, Sebastian Junger has just done the hard work for us. In My Time of Dying examines the often subtle connections between life, death, and the after-life. Junger has clearly obsessed about his subject. The result is a powerful book that comes as close as anything I've read in explaining what it means to be human."

More About the Author: Sebastian Junger is the New York Times bestselling author of Tribe, War, Freedom, A Death in Belmont, Fire, and The Perfect Storm, and co-director of the documentary film Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is also the winner of a Peabody Award and the National Magazine Award for Reporting.

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