You Can't Be Too Careful

A heavy drinker decides to cut down his alcohol intake-and dies of a heart attack caused by alcohol withdrawl. Then there's the murderer who was accidentally electrocuted sitting on his prison cell's steel toilet--just after escaping the electric chair on appeal. You can't be too careful, not in a universe that began with a random Big Bang and whose only certainty is accident.

A collection of cautionary tales gathered for years by David Pryce-Jones and illustrated with characteristic wit and precision by Pierre Le-Tan, these are succinct items whose very matter-of-factness seems to reinforce the utterly bewildering nature of life and death, the unlikely, improbable, unexpected way in which lives are swallowed up-this is the human comedy as one-liners, each with a wondrous and terrifying grain of truth about our existence.