Ebook: Dying Without God: Francois Mitterrand's Meditations on Living and Dying

The acclaimed biographer shares an intimate and revealing portrait of the former French president as he contemplates his own mortality.
Serving as President of France from 1981 to 1995, Francois Mitterand was hugely influential in shaping the county's contemporary character. Throughout his administration, he successfully hid his battle with prostate cancer that would take his life less than a year after he left office. In Dying Without God, Mitterand biographer Franz-Olivier Giesbert draws both on their longstanding acquaintance as well as a series of probing, wide-ranging conversations they had in those final months.
Ranging in topic from Napoleon to Gorbachev and from Socialism to sex, Mitterand is above all concerned with the eternal questions of mortality: Is one ever truly ready to face death? Can one, without faith, view death as a beginning rather than an end? Dying Without God presents the eminent statesman brought low by illness, yet opinionated and inquisitive to the end.