Dr. Dalrymple has written a deeply sarcastic portrait of a man who is a complete hypochondriac. Not just a "complete hypochondriac," though: a sort of lunatic world champion. I suspect that Dalrymple has been itching to get this off his chest for some time: the sort of people who actually read the daily "food and diet news" and pay attention to it. I come across these idiotic "news" stories almost every time I go to the Internet and wind up at the Yahoo portal, which is absolutely guaranteed to repeat the same articles over and over again: (1) How to save money by --- clipping coupons, not buying Starbucks, etc. (2) How to land a really lucrative job --- in the field of health care, or geriatric medicine, or system administration for computers (3) How to lose weight by the latest method (4) Which "food-of-the-day" is currently deemed "healthy."

Well, the "hero" of this book is a lunatic hypochondriac, who picks up the latest newspapers (naturally worried about the carcinogens in the ink); a man who thinks of NOTHING but his health, and never seems to realize that there's supposed to be a bit of fun in life! He is very strict about sex: he approves of it, but it must be solo, or God knows (!) what you might catch: lice, scabies, gonorrhea, or syphilis. He is terrified of restaurants (!) and of soccer matches: breeding grounds for disease.

Well, I won't reveal the ending of this novella. I suspect that, in writing it, Dalrymple may have been slightly influenced by Gosse's Father and Son: a study of two temperaments, where there is an equally telling portrait of monomania, this time a sort of "folie a trois," where father, mother, and son let their lives be totally invaded by religious hysteria.

Up to this point, Dalrymple's truth remains stranger than his fiction.

Enjoyed.

Of all Dr. Dalrymple's books that I have read so far The Examined Life is one ofthe least enjoyable, boring.

Dalrymple/Daniels never fails to please. This is a transcript of a document created by an extraordinarily eccentric man who was run over in the street and brought to the author's hospital after the accident. It includes the doctor's notes from the admission. The life examined was one in which essentially every event or occurrence triggered skeins of logical inquiry which he documented and commented upon. It takes the form of a diary of a very short period of time. It is as much an examined culture as an examined life. Well worth the quite short time it takes to read.

I have long admired Theodore Dalrymple's essays on a variety of subjects, his work as a doctor, art criticism, architecture, and the state of society generally. Here he turns his talents to writing fiction, with considerable success.

What he attempts here could easily have gone wrong and been deadly boring. The greater part of the book is an account by an unnamed forty year old man, who has been told by the appropriate government office to explain why he has been unable to work for the past ten years. He is to undergo a medical examination to validate or invalidate his claim.

What follows is a lengthy description of how he lives his life, and why. The narrator is clearly an intelligent man, with an autodidact's ability to absorb and memorize large quantities of information. Unfortunately, this has been put in service of a total obsession with monitoring his health, taking any action that he thinks will be beneficial, avoiding anything that seems risky in any way. This obsession has crowded out anything else in his life, relationships with other people, enjoyment of art, music, or other entertainments, the pleasures of food and drink, really everything. He spends every day worrying about how to balance the innumerable risks of existence in order to live as long as possible, without doing anything that most people would consider to make life worthwhile in the first place. Detail piles upon detail in what would be the ultimate in boring recitations if you actually had to listen to this fellow in real life. Reading it, however, the sheer ridiculousness of it all has a cumulative effect that had me smiling the whole way, and frequently laughing outright.

The narrator is completely and cluelessly self-centered, claiming to care about the good of society, but never showing concern for specific individuals. As a result, he leads a solitary existence, a prisoner of his own fears, unable even to seek connections with others and oblivious to what he is missing. We can laugh at him while still feeling some sympathy for his condition.

Along the way, there are a number of recognizable Dalrymple touches. He recycles some items from his factual essays: two Muslim women, completely covered except for eye slits in their veils, have a very British conversation; an elderly woman (incomprehensibly to the narrator) doesn't want to go to a doctor because she doesn't want to bother him unnecessarily. The narrator's thoughts as he leafs through a popular magazine devoted to celebrities might well be Dalrymple speaking for himself.

The ending is no great surprise, indeed it's hard to see how any other way of wrapping things up would be as satisfying. The great success of the book is keeping things going up to that point, finding the humor in what could be seen as a sad situation, finding the interest in a life which seems to be almost entirely devoid of incident.

Every page has something that makes me smile or laugh out loud -- from the first page, in which the narrator mentions that he buys newspapers on alternate days to "combine the advantages of maintaining an interest in the world, which research has shown to reduce, or slow the rate of development, of Alzheimer's disease, with those of ignoring the news, which has been demonstrated to reduce the incidence of depression..." to the ending which I should not divulge for fear of spoiling what plot there is, but believe me, it's quite in character with the rest and feels very appropriate.

That said, it's pretty much the same joke over and over, and made all the more astounding by how much material there is to milk.

This should be a short essay. It would give you the same message that the whole book did. I found its point repetitive and tedious. It is well written but I did not get the value for the book that I could not have done having a 10 minute chat about the dangers of being overly protective and how that inhibits life. Disappointing.