1
/
of
1
The Book Of The Dead - Lives Of The Justly Famous And The Undeservedly Obscure: John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
The Book Of The Dead - Lives Of The Justly Famous And The Undeservedly Obscure: John Lloyd and John Mitchinson
Regular price
$20.00 AUD
Regular price
Sale price
$20.00 AUD
Unit price
/
per
Couldn't load pickup availability
The team behind the The Book of General Ignorance turns conventional biography on its head. 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, those 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) and much more.
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) and much more.
Product Information
1st U.S. edition by Crown 2009; hardback; ust jacket not price clipped; fine condition, Antiquities & Oddities, Autobiography/Bio/Non-FictionShare
