“I spend every day finding ways to keep people alive,” says Dr. Ashely Alker. As an emergency medicine doctor, Alker has seen both death and survival, and in her new book, “99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them” (St. Martin’s), she lays out a comprehensive list of the dangers we human beings face, from the typical (stroke, heart attack) to the freakish (familial fatal insomnia, Mad Cow disease).
It’s a longish book but the chapters are short and easy to dip in and out of, Alker points out, a bid for the short attention spans of the TikTok generation.
When asked which of the 99 Ways she finds most frightening, Alker admits that on a personal level, she fears Mad Cow and other diseases caused by proteins known as prions. “I haven’t eaten meat for twenty years, so unless I start eating human brains, it’s very unlikely I would get the disease,” she says. “But it’s just absolutely terrifying.”
But on a societal scale what scares Alker the most is the rise of untrained “health and wellness influencers,” people who spread misinformation that can lead to very bad health outcomes. “People’s lives are lost every day because of this,” she says, and she warns that the number will grow as vaccine use declines amid social media (and even governmental) fear-mongering.
Misinformation is often easier to digest and spread, Dr. Alker points out, because it’s so frequently conveyed via stories, and stories are what stick in our minds. This is why, while changing patient details to avoid violating their privacy, she shares as many (accurate, science-based) stories as she can in the book.
It’s also why she founded her nonprofit, Meaningful Media, that connects medical experts with those creating television, film, and other media. After all, she points out, millions of viewers have passively learned how to perform CPR while watching it happen on a TV show — so why not present proper technique?
Emergency room doctors don’t typically have time to lecture patients on lifestyle choices and that’s not really Dr. Alker’s vibe, either. “It’s not one of those health books that’s like, ‘eat right, sleep, don’t drink, don’t smoke,’” she says. “I’m not trying to preach to you. I like to give people information and you can do whatever you want with the information.”
The book’s list of killers stops at 99 because “eventually my editor was like, ‘you have to stop writing’!”
Dr. Ashely Alker will read at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 20, at Harvard Book Store.
And now for a few notes….
A writer and photographer, Rachel Eliza Griffiths writes with precision and emotional depth about her friendship with fellow poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who died the day she was meant to have read at Griffiths’s wedding to author Salman Rushdie, and about being with Rushdie as he recovered after the violent attempt on his life in 2022. Her new book is called “The Flower Bearers” (Random House) and it will speak to anyone on a healing journey.
Two beloved authors also have new books out this week. In her new novel Jeannette Winterson (“Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”) explores and explodes the Shahrazad story. In “One Aladdin Two Lamps” (Grove Press), Winterson probes the power of storytelling itself with her well-honed wit and fearlessness. And Julian Barnes, now 80, has published “Departure(s)” (Knopf), which is both a novel about love and a philosophical meditation on life.
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