At age twenty, the author traveled overland the length of Africa. Part way through the journey, he and his traveling partner, Brian Tracy (photo right), met and worked for Nobel laureate, Albert Schweitzer, at his jungle hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon. Through the decades following his return home, Geoff read and reread all the great doctor’s published writings. This brought him to the awareness of one disheartening fact. Notwithstanding Schweitzer’s multiple accomplishments and his superb legacy of thought, public awareness of him had decreased. The mention of his name more often than not resulted in a blank stare. Although this widespread ignorance tempted the writer to skew the book in his favor, The Second Law of Dying sneaks the doctor’s history and ideas in the back door. This oblique approach, however, does not lessen the primacy of Schweitzer’s thinking, the finest of which deals with the much-disputed territory of ethics. With the current focus on corporate, political, social wrong-doing (actual, potential and alleged), the brief histories outlined in the novel, and the larger moral debates that bind it are clear and timely.