Finishing this book, which won the Pulitzer in 1974, shortly before his own premature death, Becker called it "a bid for the peace of my scholarly soul." There are no sound effects, nor is there any crackle of dialogue, but I listened five times. Never strident or hectoring, Raymond Todd has a voice you can enjoy, even when you don't yet quite understand. "The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal," Becker writes. It's not that we're horny and don't know it, as Freud postulated. We're going to die and pretend not. To understand is to free humans from their blindest and most destructive impulses.