cover image Dancing with Mr. D.

Dancing with Mr. D.

. Nan A. Talese, $23.95 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-385-48497-8

A bestseller in the Netherlands, this journal-like account of a Dutch physician's work in a nursing home for the terminally ill is a moving, oddly bracing experience. Keizer, who also has a degree in philosophy, writes with a mordant sense of humor and a stoic outlook. Drawing sustenance from the thoughts of Socrates, Zeno, Kafka, Shelley, Wilde and Wittgenstein, he comforts patients fighting cancer, AIDS, motor neuron disease and heart failure, and at times assists in euthanasia, which is legal in the Netherlands. For him, physician-assisted suicide is an ""uncharted wasteland,"" a strange territory filled with remorse and few consolations. He offers wry commentary on the average person's overestimation of doctors' powers, the failure of the ""war against cancer,"" the mental stratagems people use to cope with their fear of death and alternative medicine, which, in his diagnosis, thrives on the premise that people bring their illnesses upon themselves. At once clinically detached and empathetic, his sharp profiles of the dying animate this emotionally charged encounter with the Grim Reaper. (Mar.)