Customer Reviews

The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries (P.S.)

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This morning I read the obituaries in the newspaper. These have never been a part of my daily reading - at least not until I read Marilyn Johnson's "The Dead Beat." It's a funny and touching book that led me to discover an unsung yet immensely popular literary form to which I had never before given a second glance. This book isn't about the paid obituaries by friends and relatives of the deceased. It's about the life (and death) stories written by newspaper staff writers. They are tributes to celebrities, ordinary folks, and those who had a peripheral role in a historic or social context of their day. Besides presenting the story of a life, they are history as it is happening.

The author shares her enthusiasm for both reading and writing obituaries. She covers the history and evolution of the obituary format and content. She describes the obit fanatics who attend the Great Obituary Writers' Conference and who haunt Internet web sites, exchanging the latest gems they have unearthed from newspapers around the globe. She interviews obit writers and editors, and compares and contrasts the writing styles of various newspapers, especially between the American and British. She includes selections from obituaries that sparkle with wit and resonate with the essence of lives lost; they are poetry, folk art, gossip, and short story rolled into one.

Allow me to leave you with this example from the book, one which demonstrates that obits can be humorous: "Selma Koch, a Manhattan store owner who earned a national reputation by helping women find the right bra size, mostly through a discerning glance and never with a tape measure, died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was 95 and a 34B." If this fascinating book about an unusual subject doesn't convert you into an obituary reader, then nothing will!

Eileen Rieback

"The Dead Beat" is Marilyn Johnson's love letter to those of us who make a living writing about the dead.

Although the former Life magazine writer has written obituaries for such celebrities as Katherine Hepburn, Marlon Brando and Jackie Kennedy Onassis, she penned her book from the perspective of a fan of end-of-life mini-biographies and the newspaper reporters who compose them.

She examines our stories about recently deceased folks, looking for unusual facts and clever turns of phrase. She gets giddy at uncovering slices of life that are foreign to her, like the existence of polka halls of fame and the "Irish sports page" as a nickname for the obit page. She wonders what terminology to use for the various parts of an obit.

Her keen observations and wonderful way with words provide images that likely will be included in the "last writes" of some obit writers she has met. She compares Larken Bradley, "who writes kindly of old hippies" - dead hippies, of course - for the weekly Point Reyes (Calif.) Light, and Caroline Richmond, "a tough-skinned Brit" who pens "prickly obits" of physicians for the British Medical Journal. She says that Catherine Dunphy of the Toronto Star "manages to make Toronto, a city I've never seen, into a place I feel I know."

Her portrait of the retired Jim Nicholson, regarded as the father of "Average Joe" obits, alone is worth the price of the book.

"Dead Beat" is not an anthology, like many New York Times and Daily Telegraph of London obit books. Nor is it a how-to, like "Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers."

It is an easy- and pleasure-to-read look at once-in-a-lifetime stories and their composers.

I used to think that funeral directors must have the best conventions but after reading Marilyn Johnson's "The Dead Beat" I'll give the nod to obituary writers. This book is terrific from beginning to end and is full of humor, and, by the way, good writing.

Johnson does more than simply offer anecdotal obituaries...she comments on death and aspects relating to it. This book has a warm feel...even if her subject is one some of us tend to want to forget. To be a successful obituary writer one seems to need a knack for humor, and not "black" humor, necessarily. The author gives us her best when she does indeed share some of the contributions she has uncovered. Johnson quotes a man named Bob Schenley, who wrote an obit of a Pittsburgh Pirates broadcaster..."Almost everyone in Pittsburgh who loves baseball....loved Bob Prince, unless, of course, they actually knew him. He was a miserable mean-spirited drunk." My favorite, however, was this one written about Suzanne Kaaren, ninety-two, an actress who had appeared in several Three Stooges shorts. Penned by Stephen Miller, he said of Kaaren, "The Stooges seemed to value her opinion and regularly tried out new material on her." This kind of writing is dead-on funny.

The unusual narrow shape of "The Dead Beat" gives the reader the feeling of scanning a newspaper and is another welcome addition. Johnson delivers a flow which never lets down and does not disappoint. I loved "The Dead Beat" and I highly recommend it.

"Selma Koch, a Manhattan store owner who earned a national reputation by helping women find the right bra size, mostly through a discerning glance and never with a tape measure, died Thursday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was 95 and a 34B."

It may take especially thick skin to find a book on the subject of obituaries anything but depressing and morbid, but for those like me who are pre-disposed to finding such things more entertaining and fascinating than frightening this is an appealing topic. Then again, I'm native to the Deep South, where people go on death watch the minute you pick up the phone to make an appointment for a medical check up. In a culture that lives to bake casseroles in anticipation of disaster, any southern cook worth her salt will have water on to boil the instant Uncle Leroy feels the first chest pain, and by the time he hits the floor will have the casserole sitting on his doorstep.

Marilyn Johnson is a woman obsessed by obituaries, and in The Dead Beat she writes about the good, the bad and the ugly of the genre. What makes a good obituary, what makes a bad one, and how can we tell the difference? Burning questions, all of them, and every one is answered in this book, complete with numerous examples of all sorts of tributes. Some are weepy, some are wonderfully catty and some are just plain pathetic, but what they tell us is the subject of death is morbidly fascinating to us all.

Obituaries can also apparently be informative:

"How about Harold von Braunhut, the genius behind sea monkeys? Sea Monkeys, mail-order packets of brine shrimp, shrimp that could be shipped and shelved in dried form, sprang to life when dropped in water; 400 million of them once shot into space with an astronaut. I learned this on the obits page. War, pestilence, bad investment news, and political rants in sections A through D, but there, on the page marked Obituaries - sea monkeys!"

In the midst of all her rapture on the subject of obituaries, Johnson also realizes there's something somewhat off-kilter about her enthusiasm. It may be encouraging to know she does recognize and address this in the course of the book, "How do I say this? I scare nurses. My children are used to it, but fewer of their friends drop by, I've noticed."

The Dead Beat is, strange as it sounds, a great read for those interested in the off-beat, quirky journalism behind obituaries. As reviewer Lisa Grunwald puts it, "Vital reading for anyone who knows a dead person or is likely to become one."

If this doesn't give you a taste for tuna casserole I frankly don't know what will.

Who could predict that the obituaries would become the most widely read portion of today's newspapers. Just as Mary Roach's "Stiff" explored what happens to your body after you're dead, Marilyn Johnson's "Dead Beat" opens our eyes to the written legacy that the obituarist leaves--essentially the short story of a life. There is an art to this, as revealed in some of the delightful excerpts in her book--the best obits don't just recite vital statistics, but rather spotlight the "specialness" (quirky habits, unusual talents, life-changing moments, etc) of the individual as gleaned from interviews with families and friends. I like the idea that the obit focuses the reader's attention on the life of one person, whether famous or not, and then demands an acknowledgement of the loss of that particular bundle of DNA, never to be duplicated. Full of wit and thoughtful exploration of a rarely discussed subject, this book is a real winner.

Marilyn Johnson's lovely little tome on the art of the obit is sure to attract the attention of all those addicts who first open their morning paper not to the comics, the sports pages or even the horoscopes or crosswords puzzles. Members of Obit Readers Anonymous will feed on the stories of lives lived long or short, famous or not but always of curiosity and fascination. They are uniquely portrayed capsules of monumental men and women who came and conquered their corner of the world, albeit the English speaking world from which Johnson draws her material. They are the doctors and nurses, the preachers and the teachers, the politicos and the potentates, the lowly and the newly risen, the artists and the wanna-be's, the folks around the bend or down at the corner.

In prose that waxes poetic, Johnson not only relates the obits but also their originators, the unsung heroes of the journalistic trade: the obituarists. Her interviews uncover secrets, foibles and passions worthy of front page coverage. Her addiction to the well-written obituary takes her across the country and oceans, through dusty paper files and on the trail of internet sources to fill us with all we ever needed to know about the fine art.

Johnson examines the death writing business and soon makes it clear that the real topic is not death but life. Life lived boisterously or timidly, with sweet or ornery disposition, fitting a mold or breaking the pattern, making a mark or being marked. Finding the essential in the person is the signature of a good obituarist. Or as Johnson says: "What it takes to be a good obituary writer is an ability to write well, to capture a person with economy and grace, and work in the hurricane of emotion that swirls around the newly dead." Johnson does it all.

Marilyn Johnson has touched on a subject that is with us all on a daily basis, one some of us are secretly fascinated by, others are much more open in their appreciation of, and yet which most of us of us take for granted. That of obituaries.

Who writes them, how have they evolved, and why do some of them touch us even though they are written of people we have never known nor even heard of?

This book is eye opening and fun. A joy to read and will make one laugh and be touched, often within the same paragraph. A truly quirky celebration of life.

Marilyn Johnson wakes every morning with an incredible and unusual craving. She has to get to the morning newspapers in order to get to her favorite page, the obit, and see who as she puts it 'has left the building for good'.
In this book she explores the historical backgroud to and the living characters of her passion, 'obituary writing' and does so according to all accounts in a humorous and humane way.
As a former 'Life 'obituary writer she tells us that she loved those assignments when some great star or personality was on the verge, and when she in great urgency and with great drama had to find out all that she could in order to write the obituary. She reports that very often the 'on the verge' character proved crusty and tough, and pulled through. And so obituaries she wrote at various times for Katherine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, among others were never published.
But while she did not make a fabulous career of writing obits, she probably has made a quantum leap upward in celebrity status with this book.
My guess is it is going to be a great bestseller. As James Atlas points out in an outstanding review of the book which appears in 'New York Magazine' seventy- eight million baby -boomers are on the verge of age sixty. 'Getting out of the world' is a subject of increasing interest to many.
Johnson provides in this book a history of the genre including its most important recent developments. One is that a St.Louis reporter in the 1980's Jim Nicholson began writing a different kind of obituary. These common folk obituaries modeled a bit after the writing of Damon Runyan provided portraits of the idiosyncracies, personal habits of common people. Nicholson wrote them for 'the families' and they have a special humane quality.
The other pole of the enterprise is the cooler British tack of turning a formely unsigned anonymous dry supposedly objective piece of writing, to a personal signed subjective take on the subject. Michiko Kukatani in her New York Times Review of this book cites Johnson's definition of this." A great British obit doesn't read like a prosaic résumé," It's an opinionated gem of a biography, informed by all kinds of history, high and low, including gossip. It has the clear-eyed perspective of an op-ed piece and the drama of the news." .. - the quintessential British obit, in Ms. Johnson's words, "doesn't pull its punches in consideration of the dead."
This book also contains interviews with and character- studies of the people doing the obituary writing today.
'Obituary' seems to be a genre which has taken off recently. I notice that I myself as I get older also read this particular 'page' of the paper more than I used to.
But here is the paradoxical point. When I read an obituary I often do so in order to learn about the life as much or as more as about the death. A good obituary is a 'minibiography' which tells a life - story ideally in an interesting and true way.
There are other elements in reading obituaries. The editor of this book Mr. Hirshler says that one reason we read obituaries is 'to keep score' No matter how more accomplished, successful, happier once the person is who has died, we reading it have ' won' somehow because we are still here. An odd way of thinking but I will confess to sharing it, and being ashamed of sharing it sometimes.
I would add two more words about obituaries. Very occasionally an obituary is a true work of art , a moving tale of a life which has been inspiring.
But also and this has to be said to check a bit the good spirit and the humor of the whole enterprise. There are truly tragic deaths and people whose ends are horrible, and lives which never get a chance to be lived. There are those for whom there are no obituaries, and those for whose death and life there can be no words.

It's difficult to imagine an entire book dedicated to telling the average reader about those folks who write obituaries for a living. This book, however, takes on that daunting task, and fully delivers, with information and humor. Those of us who don't do this kind of writing can't imagine that it is an intense experieance for the writer, especially those who sytrive to give the reader a close insight into the person who has died. We learn about the newspapers that contain the "best" obituaries, and also those writers who are considered at the top of this unusual pyramid. If you want to be informed, and entertained, about a very unusual subject, you can't go wrong with this book.

Marilyn Johnson proves that good stories are the product of good reporting. Her inquiry into the art of the obituary takes her to far-flung corners of the globe,and she gets the goods wherever she goes. Through her, we meet some of the finest obituarists on the planet, and we learn how they capture and tell the stories of lives great and small. This is a jewel of a book, joyfully free of typographical and grammatical errors. It has been written and edited with care, and it holds your attention from the first page to the last.