The Book of the Dead: Lives of the Justly Famous and the Undeservedly Obscure

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.