The team behind the New York Times bestseller The Book of
General Ignorance turns conventional biography on its
head—and shakes out the good stuff.
Following their Herculean—or is it Sisyphean?—efforts to
save the living from ignorance, the two wittiest Johns in
the English language turn their attention to the dead.
As the authors themselves say, “The first thing that strikes
you about the Dead is just how many of them there are.”
Helpfully, Lloyd and Mitchinson have employed a simple—but
ruthless—criterion for inclusion: the dead person has to be
interesting.
Here, then, is a dictionary of the dead, an encyclopedia of
the embalmed. Ludicrous in scope, whimsical in its
arrangement, this wildly entertaining tome presents pithy
and provocative biographies of the no-longer-living from the
famous to the undeservedly and—until now—permanently
obscure. Spades in hand, Lloyd and Mitchinson have dug up
everything embarrassing, fascinating, and downright weird
about their subjects’ lives and added their own uniquely
irreverent observations.
Organized by capricious categories—such as dead people who
died virgins, who kept pet monkeys, who lost limbs, whose
corpses refused to stay put—the dearly departed, from the
inventor of the stove to a cross-dressing, bear-baiting
female gangster finally receive the epitaphs they truly deserve.
Discover:
* Why Freud had a lifelong fear of trains
* The one thing that really made Isaac Newton laugh
* How Catherine the Great really died (no horse was involved)
Much like the country doctor who cured smallpox (he’s in
here), Lloyd and Mitchinson have the perfect antidote for
anyone out there dying of boredom. The Book of the Dead—like
life itself—is hilarious, tragic, bizarre, and amazing. You
may never pass a graveyard again without chuckling.
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