We can get preventive screenings or cosmetic surgery, buy anti-aging products and eat more kale, throw ourselves into meditation and spirituality—yet these offer only an illusion of control over our mortality. How then should we live? Considering sociological trends and her own experiences as well as the scientific literature, the author of Nickel and Dimed here examines the ways in which we obsess over our bodies, our health, and our death. In her caustically funny style, Barbara Ehrenreich discusses the rarely acknowledged tendency of our own immune cells to promote cancers, then tackles the knotty problem of how we might better prepare ourselves for the end while still reveling in the life that remains to us.