Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir by David Rieff (Simon and Schuster, 192 pages, $21.00) Western thought records a long tradition of morbid interest in how philosophers met their deaths. Memorials, testimonies, and whole Platonic dialogues have been devoted to great thinkers' final hours. That's because, historically, the ability to face mortality with perfect equanimity, and fearlessly hold onto values higher than those of daily life, was considered the greatest part of wisdom. "And is not philosophy a practice of death?" Socrates asked in the Phaedo . It was, of course, a rhetorical question: Socrates drank his hemlock, calmed his disciples, and earned the amazement of posterity -- his death demonstrating how great a philosopher he was. Epicurus, who famously preached the doctrine that death must hold no fear because no person persists past death to suffer from it, proved his consistency by dying happily, drinking wine in a warm bath. In modern times, too, philosophers'...