Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death by Irvin D. Yalom
Published 2008 · 306 pages · 82,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death to read?
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Clinical and philosophical vocabulary handled accessibly; Yalom defines terms from Heidegger for a general audience.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Existential concepts are present throughout but always grounded in clinical examples.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Dense with philosophical reference and case material; efficiently argued.
- Narrative indirection: 15 out of 100
- Mostly direct argument illustrated by case histories.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Analytical and clinical throughout.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Warm, earnest therapeutic register; occasional self-deprecating humor.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- Offers a framework for confronting death anxiety without claiming to eliminate it.
- Structural complexity: 32 out of 100
- Organized thematically around aspects of death anxiety and philosophical responses.
How Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death is regarded
Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death holds a literary regard score of 50 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.