Staying Alive

There are all sorts of ways to end up dead. Disease, accidents and crime are among the common ways to be done in. Natural disasters can trap you. Drug overdoses or reactions can kill. Animal attacks can get you. So can war.

In 99 Ways to Die And How to Avoid Them, Ashely Alker, M.D., enumerates the different ways the Grim Reaper can take you and offers strategies for avoiding his grip.

The author knows something of both death and its avoidance. Dr. Alker describes herself as a death escapologist. In plain language, she is an emergency medicine doctor. She divides the book into thirteen categories of causes of death: infections, vaccine-preventable diseases, heart diseases, brain diseases, sex, drugs, animals, poison, food, travel, crime, environmental issues, and warfare. Each section has chapters explaining specific risks. (An example: the sex section has a chapter on risks associated with pregnancy.) There is some overlap: some diseases poison you and some of the risks associated with food spill into infection and poison.

Each chapter outlines the risks of its featured issue. How does something cause death? What are the symptoms? How do you avoid the problem or reduce the risk associated with it? Alker freely admits that many risks cannot be avoided but can merely be managed. Death gets all of us in the end.

She tells her story with humor, bringing in her emergency room practice, drawing from personal experiences with patients and in her own life. (Some are downright surprising, including her own encounter with a serial killer.) She writes from the perspective of an establishment practitioner of medicine, with both the advantages and limitations implied.

The book’s multiple short chapters make it great bedtime reading. You can put it down after a brief read without losing the thread of what you have been reading. However, a terminal worrier will likely spend the rest of the night unable to sleep. Nor is this a book for hypochondriacs. Imagined symptoms (even real ones – as Alker frequently points out, innocent aches and pains sometimes mask deadly problems) will likely prompt multiple trips to the ER after every chapter.

For everyone else? 99 Ways to Die is both entertaining and informative, illuminating and often hilarious. Readers will have to make their own judgments about the risks of their activities. (Is life without cheeseburgers worth living? That is an individual decision.) Yet this book allows informed consent.

“99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them,” by Ashely Alker M.D., St. Martin's Press, January 2026, 384 pages, $30.00 (Hardcover), $15.99 (E-book), $23.57 (Audiobook)

This review was written by Mark Lardas, who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.