With humanity, insight, and occasional humour, author Matt Sturrock has selected from the annals of history an eclectic group of people—an Alexandrian mathematician, a Haitian slave, an English philosopher, a Vietnamese monk—who met the inevitable with élan, unflappability, dignity, or physical courage. Many of these people lived and died continents and millennia apart. They subscribed to creeds the others in these pages would have found alien and unfathomable. Yet they are thrust together here because of their extraordinary strength of character in the face of annihilation. Their stories are irrefutable proof of the old maxim that living and dying well are ultimately inextricable.