Goodbye to Clocks Ticking, Joseph Monninger
Goodbye to Clocks Ticking, Joseph Monninger
List: $22.00 | Sale: $15.40
Club: $11.00

Goodbye to Clocks Ticking
How We Live While Dying

Author: Joseph Monninger

Narrator: Matthew Spaur

Unabridged: 6 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Steerforth

Published: 03/07/2023


Synopsis

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 us 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

About The Author

Joseph Monninger has published many novels for adults and young readers, three books of nonfiction, and dozens of articles for periodicals such as Sports Illustrated, American Heritage, Scientific American and the Boston Globe. An international bestseller, his work has been widely translated and published in more than forty countries. Goodbye to Clocks Ticking is his account of life after receiving a fatal lung cancer diagnosis three days into his retirement. He has lived beside the Baker River in New Hampshire for more than thirty years where he also worked as a college professor, fishing guide, and dog sled driver.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Arthur on March 25, 2023

Joe Monninger and I were colleagues in the English Department of New Hampshire’s Plymouth State University for over twenty years. For much of that time we had offices facing each other across the hall in the old house that was home to the English Department, and we had the same office hours, so we sp......more

Goodreads review by Tony on April 06, 2023

A beautiful beautiful book on so many levels. Thank you.......more

Goodreads review by Kim on October 27, 2023

My biggest criticism of the book is the flat presentations of the author’s two primary supporters through his cancer diagnosis - his girlfriend and his son. While they both stepped up to the plate and accompanied him along his journey, doing everything that one does for a loved one with an unexpecte......more

Goodreads review by Albert on November 14, 2023

Beautiful, Joe. Just beautiful.......more

Goodreads review by Jennifer on February 01, 2025

He was my undergraduate advisor at Plymouth State in New Hampshire in the 1990s. We’d talk about fiction, great poets, and the New England landscape. He helped me take writing more seriously. As I read his memoir, I heard his voice so clearly. This was an honest and interesting account of when death......more


Quotes

"A poignant, instructive account of reckoning with a terminal illness." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“…elegant, meditative memoir…” — Shelf Awareness (starred review)

“He [Joseph Monninger] tells the story of a singular year of challenges, insights and peculiar gifts. Written in the style of a sort of postcard from a place many will one day visit, it offers wisdom, insight and a suspenseful story of how to relish and celebrate our lives.” — The Vicksburg Post

"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