This is the publisher's website. Worth a quick read. In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger. Took 3 tries to get the link right.

Edited: 05/21/2024 at 04:52 PM by ww

Re-checked, and a bit of text that i was sure was there, wasn't. I'm feeling poxed.

So here's the relevant text from the NY Times story with an interview:

Over the course of his reporting career, Sebastian Junger has had several close calls with death. A bullet whizzed past his face in Afghanistan; another time, a bomb exploded in his Humvee. Even when he wasn't covering war, death was a theme in his work. Junger's most famous book, "The Perfect Storm," is about extreme weather, but it's also about a group of men who never came home.

In the introduction to his memoir, "In My Time of Dying," which Simon & Schuster will publish on May 21, he describes his own near-drowning while surfing - the shock of being shoved underwater as if by an invisible hand, the flashbulb memory of dirty dishes in his sink, the way the shadow of death suddenly eclipsed an ordinary day.

"I was young," Junger writes, "and had no idea the world killed people so casually."