Goodbye to Clocks Ticking

How We Live While Dying

De: Joseph Monninger

Narrado por: Matthew Spaur

An uplifting journey of truly seeing and appreciating what makes life worth living in the year following a terminal diagnosis

For fans of Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days and Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

Goodbye to Clocks Ticking is an unforgettable book that tells the story of a singular year of challenges, insights, and peculiar gifts. It is also a sort of postcard from a place many of will one day visit.

After thirty-two years of teaching, Joe Monninger, an avid outdoorsman in robust health, was looking forward to a long retirement with the love of his life in a cabin beside a New England estuary. Three days after his last class, however, he’s diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, even though he has not smoked for more than 30 years. It was May, and he might be dead by early fall.

Soon Joe learned, however, that he was a genetic match for treatment with a drug that could not cure his cancer, but could prolong his life. With this temporary reprieve, he sets out to live life to the fullest and to write about the year of grace that follows, from his cancer treatments to his innermost thoughts.

Goodbye to Clocks Ticking is a work of wisdom and insight. Joe Monninger’s aubade to the world that he knew and loved offers a page-turning, suspenseful story to relish and to celebrate, to share and to discuss, to ponder and to learn from.

"Full of heart and discovery." – Booklist, on Joseph Monninger's writing

©2023 Joseph Monninger (P)2023 Steerforth Press LLC

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Someone in need of precisely this book will pick it up, read it, and their spirit will be lifted."

--Jonathan Carroll, author of Mr. Breakfast

"This book is so powerful that I had to stop a couple times to stop my eyes from filling. I especially love Monninger's thoughts on nature and all life and our own existence within it and not separate from it."

--Bill Taddicken, Director of the Iain Nicolson Audubon Center at Rowe Sanctuary

Goodbye to a an influential professor

After hearing of his death I knew I had to dive into this. I had him as a creative writing professor, and as an American literature professor as an undergraduate at Plymouth State. I was introduced to many of my favorite novels in his classes and he pushed me to trust myself as a writer. Reading this book brought me to tears more than once as I remembered his classes and the enormous respect I had for him. I found this to be a beautiful, raw, vulnerable, and harrowingly honest account of a man grappling with his mortality. It was a gut wrenching goodbye to anyone who had the privilege to know him, even briefly. RIP Monninger