A collection of essays describes the author's obsessive pursuit of a variety of extreme athletic challenges, including an Outward Bound course during a Maine winter, a showdown with a Judo instructor, and an unconventional seventieth-birthday marathon.

"One of the most profound, deeply affecting questions we face as human beings is the matter of our mortality - and its connection to immorality. Ancient animist ghost cultures, Egyptian mummification, late Jewish hopes of resurrection, Christian eternal salvation, Muslim belief in hell and paradise all spring from a remarkably consistent impulse to tether a triumph over death to our conduct in life." "In After Lives, British scholar John Casey provides...