Writing about “99 Ways to Die: and How to Avoid Them” is an easy job, and not just because the descriptive title does so much of the work.
To give you an idea of what to expect from Ashely Alker’s hilarious, surprisingly useful book, the best bet is just to quote from it liberally. The emergency room physician writes with attitude, common sense and deep knowledge about ordinary and extraordinary health risks (spoiler alert: there are way more than 99 of them). Most of us, for instance, will never encounter the spitting thick-tailed black scorpion of Africa but just about everyone would like some commonsense tips on how to avoid catching a cold (some are obvious: wash your hands often).
That particular scorpion is a good place to start quoting Alker, to give a sense of how much fun she is to read. Of those scorpions, which dislike cinnamon, she has this to say: “They clearly want to be left alone. These arthropods are not hunting you; think of it like a run-in with your high-school ex in a grocery store — neither of you wants to be there. No touching, back away slowly and go immediately to the spice aisle to create a cinnamon circle."
“99 Ways to Die” probably isn’t for you if you’re one of those people who imagines you have the symptoms of whatever disease you’re reading about because, trust me, you don’t want to think you have the symptoms brought about by eating tainted barracuda (they include the sensation that your teeth are falling out).
If you’re a vaccine denier, you’ll grow impatient with the book, in which I counted more than 200 uses of the word “vaccine” before deciding that was no longer a fun game and I was done with it. Vaccines are the key to the “how to avoid them” part of Alker’s title in many cases, as well as the source of breezy anecdotes like one about a teenager who was perving on some milkmaids in the 18th century when he inadvertently discovered the smallpox vaccine.
Throughout the book, Alker comes off as the sort of witty, no-nonsense doc you’d hope to encounter in the ER, one just as likely to dazzle a heart patient with a reference to Taylor Swift as to an outdated ‘80s action hero: “I did what any decent emergency medicine doctor would do in my situation, I MacGyvered my way out of it, creating a solution with two rubber bands, chewing gum, a defibrillator and a nearby hospital. The rubber bands were for my hair and I was chewing the gum. Sascha did well and we now stock the necessary medication at my freestanding emergency department.”
Here she is on how kangaroos can kill you when you visit lovely Australia: “Roos seem to really focus on leg day, but their tiny T. rex arms are also shockingly strong and equipped with claws. The male stands at an impressive six feet ten inches long, yoked to the max with rippling muscles. When they fight they look like tiny-armed teenagers in a slap fight, until they kick and bust the opposition’s spleen.”
On that same trip, you’ll want to avoid the colorful, deadly sea slugs known as nudibranch because “these kids are the wilderness equivalent of RuPaul’s pride parade float, there to be seen, but the background music is blaring, loud and clear, ‘Can’t Touch This.’”
