The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life and Death

A dark undercurrent of very real fear streams under Gene Weingarten's — a Washington Post editor — humorous (ha-ha) new book The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life and Death, which examines curious bodily fluids, floaters before the eye, unexplained yawning, and other assorted non-symptoms. We've seen this high anxiety before, in Cameron Tuttle's somewhat more abstract Paranoid's Pocket Guide. Ever vigilant for signals of a tumor, stroke, or heart cancer (yes, heart cancer), Weingarten half merrily, half anxiously dispenses with journalistic objectivity — though he does interview a doctor whose specialty is the passage of gas — and fleshes out concerns about his own mortality in detail that's not for the squeamish. Truly illin'. B