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Fearlessly frank and endearingly geeky reflections on life and death by a neurosurgeon diagnosed with cancerA reader faced with the third instalment of a famous neurosurgeon’s memoirs is entitled to a sinking feeling. They might be forgiven for the suspicion that such a book was conceived at a boozy party celebrating the sales of the previous two. Not only that, but memoirs by medics can feel anticlimactic. The daily proximity of life-and-death decisions makes them akin to war stories, but they lack the sweep of history, and there is the feeling that the work of one doctor, in contrast to that of war heroes, is much like that of any other.All of this is to say that I was prepared to be bored by the subject and irritated by the author. I was wrong: given its subject – broadly, death and disease – the book is unexpectedly fun, and the author pretty much irresistibly likable. This is a very British book: in the US such a compendium of self-deprecation would doom any literary and elder-statesman ambitions. Ben Carson, also a neurosurgeon, wrote memoirs that are relentlessly edifying and self-congratulatory but he was, after all, running for president. Marsh is running for exercise, and in one of the many melancholy references to advancing age scattered through the book, mentions being overtaken by a gazelle-like female runner with whom he exchanges a wry smile of incongruous fellowship. But lamenting incipient old age is only one of the threads in the book. Continue reading...