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Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries
HarperCollins
March 2006
On Sale: February 28, 2006
256 pages
ISBN: 0060758759
EAN: 9780060758752
Paperback
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Non-Fiction
The New York Times comes each morning and never fails to
deliver news of the important dead. Every day is new; every
day is fraught with significance. I arrange my cup of tea,
prop up my slippers. Obituaries are history as it is
happening. Whose time am I living in? Was he a success or a
failure, lucky or doomed, older than I am or younger? Did
she know how to live? I shake out the pages. Tell me the
secret of a good life!Where else can you celebrate the life
of the pharmacist who moonlighted as a spy, the genius
behind Sea Monkeys, the school lunch lady who spent her
evenings as a ballroom hostess? No wonder so many readers
skip the news and the sports and go directly to the obituary
page. The Dead Beat is the story of how these stories get told.
Enthralled by the fascinating lives that were marching out
of this world, Marilyn Johnson tumbled into the obits page
to find out what made it so lively. She sought out the best
obits in the English language and chased the people who
spent their lives writing about the dead. Surveying the
darkest corners of Internet chat rooms, surviving a mass
gathering of obituarists, and making a pilgrimage to London
to savor the most caustic and literate obits of all, Marilyn
Johnson leads us into the cult and culture behind the
obituary page. The result is a rare combination of scrapbook
and compelling read, a trip through recent history and the
unusual lives we don't quite appreciate until they're gone.
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