Customer Reviews

The Economist Book of Obituaries

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My Overall Opinion of the Book
This book was fascinating, educational, funny, political, and judgmental. It is almost never sad. A collection of 200 obituaries written between 1994 to 2008 (each one two pages long), The Economist Book of Obituaries is oddly enjoyable and fascinating. It may sound a strange book to read, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Even if you are not a fan of obituaries (and there are many obituary fans out there), I think you could enjoy this book purely from an entertainment and educational perspective.

Why I Read the Book
I became interested in this book after reading Marilyn Johnson's The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries [[ASIN:0060758767 The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries (P.S.)]. Johnson's book documents her love of obituaries and some of the great writers of the genre. While reading her book, I learned the difference between American and British obituaries (the British are not afraid to "tell it like they see it") and joined Johnson on her visit to some of the leading obituary writers of the world. The Dead Beat was a pretty fun book to read, and I found myself wanting to read the type of obituaries that got Johnson so excited. So when LibraryThing listed The Economist Book of Obituaries in its Early Reviewer books for November, I jumped at the chance to get it. I was thrilled when I was lucky enough to receive a review copy.

The Basic Structure of the Book
This is not a book you need to read straight-through. It is ideal for picking up and putting down at will. Each obituary is two pages long and includes a relevant black and white photo. The obituaries are listed in alphabetical order, and there is a Table of Contents to let you pick which ones you might want to read. (I read the book straight through since I was reviewing it, but I could definitely view this more as a book to peruse at your leisure.) Each obituary starts with a single sentence that tells the name of the deceased, their basic "claim to fame," their date of death and their age at the time of death. Other than these basic structural elements, each obituary is wildly different in style, tone and purpose.

Who Is Covered In the Book
The obituaries in the book include 199 people and one parrot (Alex the African Grey -- billed as "science's best-known parrot"). The famous (Princess Diana, Bob Hope, John Paul II, Julia Child, Norman Mailer) and the not-so-famous (the inventor of the Cup of Noodles, the inventor of frozen non-dairy topping, America's King of the Hobos, Japan's royal tutor, one of the founders of Mensa). The subjects are from a wide variety of countries and from all walks of life -- scientists, musicians, writers, social activists, criminals, royalty. What makes this book great is that it doesn't matter what you know about the subject (half of the people in the book I'd never heard of), you will learn about them, their importance in the world, and their contributions to their chosen field. Each obituary is not so much about the individual person and their life story, but more about what their life meant to the world they lived in.

For example, the obituary of Sue Sumii--a champion of Japan's untouchables -- is clearly meant as a way to highlight this little discussed aspect of Japanese society. The obituary of Yasser Talal al-Zahrani -- a prisoner in Guantanamo who died at the age of 21 -- is meant to be a statement of the wrongness of Guantanamo. This particular obituary ends like this:

"As he had hoped, his death led voices around the world to demand that the camp be closed. One senior American official, immovable, called his suicide 'a good PR move.' She may have been right; Guantanamo, alas, remains, wrong."

Not all the obituaries are of a political nature. Some are sly social commentary--such as the joint obituary of Brooke Astor and Leona Helmsley (both "grandes dames of New York") that compares the two ladies radically different approaches to life by comparing everything from their dogs to their real estate holdings.

Other obituaries are very educational on a particular topic to which the person being written about contributed -- such as cricket, beekeeping, auto racing, container ships, aviation safety, surrogate parenting law, to name just a few.

Perhaps the most creatively written obituary is the joint obituary of Robert Brooks (one of the founders of Hooters) and Mickey Spillane (creator of Mike Hammer), which is written as a short story that has Mike Hammer going to Hooters. That this obituary manages to tie two such disparate people together as "suppliers of fantasies to American males" and be written in a story format while still managing to pay homage to both subjects is just pure genius.

The Style of the Book
What makes these obituaries such a pleasure to read is the style in which they are written. The authors are not afraid to be irreverent, and they do not shy away from taking a detour away from the main story to make an important point. In short, the obituaries are very well-written, which is why it didn't always matter to me who they were writing about. I marked some of the my particular favorites to give you a sense of what makes these obituaries such a pleasure to read.

From the obituary of Jeanne Calment (the world's oldest person): "Perhaps it does not matter. For most people, the interest in Mrs. Calment was her durability."

From the obituary of Barbara Cartland: "She was worried about her prospects for immortality, as indeed she had reason to be."

From the obituary of Estee Lauder: "Time, however, also trailed her, with his ghastly wrinkled face and his sallow hue that coordinated with no bathrooms."

From the obituary of Stanley Marcus (founder of Neiman-Marcus): "There comes a time in the life of the average billionaire when money ceases to be important. Suddenly it no longer seems to make the world go round; it has become quite boring. Stanley Marcus was sympathetic to the problem and sought to rekindle interest in possessions among those who wanted for nothing."

From the obituary of Dr Spock: "It was, on the face of it, an odd book to have become one of the bestsellers of the century. The one endeavour the human race was used to, and indeed had become quite good at, was having babies and bringing them to adulthood."

Wrap-Up
I hope this review has conveyed what a unique and fascinating book this is. It certainly made me understand why Marilyn Johnson and so many others enjoy reading obituaries on a regular basis. I suspect that this book contains the creme de la creme of obituary writing, and I hope to see another edition in the future!

One final note: The book itself has a very rich feel to it. The paper has a nice sheen to it, and the book feels very weighty and solid. I appreciated that feeling and find it appropriate for a book that contains the story of 199 human lives and 1 parrot.

As a big fan of well-written obituaries (like those in the New York Times) I am always looking for more pungently penned death notices.

This collection of obits from the Economist was right up my alley. They never published obits prior to 1995 so they are making up for lost time. They only publish one per week so they are ultra-selective. There are plenty of famous deaths marked in this book. I prefer those that honor people we might have never heard of, like Jean Baudrillard the philosopher of consumerism, Christopher Cockerell, the inventor of the hovercraft, and Rene' Thom the inventor of catastrophe theory.

One particular favorite is for "Bip." Do you remember Bip? Read this fine collection and you'll remember him.. Psst...if you know who Bip was please say nothing about it....

Despite the gloomy title and topic, this compilation is a fascinating collection of, essentially, mini-biographies featured within the Economist during the past decade. The Economist has raised the act of obituary writing to an art form, avoiding the chronological approach to discussing the importance of a person's life, but, rather, focusing on the pure essence of what made an individual's life significant and noteworthy. The profiles collected within are not necessarily those of well-known world leaders. They are, however, profiles of people who made an impact upon the world around them, be that world defined geographically or within a vocational sector. Many may be names one has never heard of. But in reading these short biographies, the reader can't help but feel inspired.

No fun is more welcome than unlikely fun.

I never thought "The Economist" and "obituaries" would find themselves in the same sentence. But English newspapers are uncommonly imaginative. And so, after 150 years without an obituary page, the editors of The Economist decided to lunch one.

"The Economist Book of Obituaries"is a collection of 200 obituaries that the paper published between 1995 and 2008. The length is fixed --- about 1,000 words. There is no template for the subjects.

Oh, there are the obligatory world leaders and corporate kings. And a British book of obits that did not include Princess Diana would raise the eyebrows of the dead. No matter. The telling detail and the previously unseen anecdote make this a seriously delightful book.

Did you know --- this is from an obit of Digby Baltzell, the scholar who coined the word WASP --- that Al Capone's son went to Yale and married a "well-connected" woman?

Did you know that Dr. Christian Barnard, who performed the first transplant of a human heart, believed that sex-with-romance was "the most beautiful, healthiest and most pleasurable way" to keep fit?

Did you know that Freddy Heineken wanted to put his beer in square bottles so the empties could be used as bricks in Third World countries?

And so many more. A musical psychic. A talking bird. The world's oldest person. (The obit begins: "For l00 years nothing much happened to Jeanne Calment.") A French ski champion, dead at 31. The king of the gypsies. The editor of the Weekly World News, who used "Bolivia" as a deadline when a story was an especially wild fabrication. A man who learned to read at age 98. Pamela Harriman, "expert between the sheets". The forger of the "Hitler diaries". Mao's mouthpiece. An English gardener.

It's a richly rewarding book, deserving of a place of honor on a coffee table. An ideal hostess gift. Useful on the bedside table, where it invites you to read one death a night, comforted by the expectation that you'll be back for the another the next night. And just delightful to read, because, as you'd expect from The Economist, these obits are so well written. Like this, on Marcel Marceau, the mime:

"He [Bip] never spoke. Mr Marceau's father died in 1944 in Auschwitz, and Bip's silence was a tribute to all those who had been silenced in the camps. It was a recollection, too, of the necessary muteness of resistance fighters caught by the Nazis, or quietly leading children across the Swiss border to safety, as Mr Marceau had done. In one of his acts, "Bip Remembers", the sad-faced clown relived in mime the horrors of the war and stressed the necessity of love. In another, his hands became good and evil: evil clenched and jerky, good flowing and emollient, with good just winning."

As a professional obituarist, albeit on a very small scale, this book gives me two goals: to write as well as Kenneth Colquhoun and Ann Wroe and to deserve an obituary in The Economist. The bar for the second is lower. While writers such as Colquhoun and Wroe are rare, if less so in the U.K., one need only be a deposed royal, a defunct dictator, a poet of dubious talent, the last survivor of a largely-forgotten battle or a clever parrot to deserve a page in the back matter of "the paper" as it is called.
The obituaries are more often than not more entertaining and useful than their subjects. The seriously bad are called by their true names without waffling or bile; the virtuous are given their due without fawning. The accompanying photos are as revealing as the text.

This book includes both the well-known (Allen Ginsberg) and the lesser known (at least in the US) but significant (Maurice Couve de Murville). All the obituaries are facinating, and tell the reader things she might not have known already about the well-known (Ginsberg managed to offend John Lennon) and why the less-known should be known (Couve, the foreign minister of French President from 1959-69, Charles de Gaulle, is largely credited with policies that still affect France's place in world politics.) It's not the most aesthetically attractive volume (black and white pictures; the type is smallish) but reading about the lives they lived is worth it.

The Economist obituaries are a treat for regular readers of the magazine. But even a regular reader over the years, thirteen or so, that the feature has appeared in the magazine will be surprised at how many obituaries he cannot recall seeing before. Each obituary is only one magazine page in length, which is a strength of the feature and thus of the book. Perhaps a few obits could have been included that were not, but that is only a quibble. Each reader will have his favorites. (The Mickey Spillane entry comes to mind.)

Written in the smug, strident style of the magazine, the obits are poorly researched and inaccurate. For example, in the review of Allen Ginsberg, you'll be surprised to learn that the Beats started Flower Power - and I always thought it was the hippies. In another review, we learn that The Big Bopper and Richie Valens were Buddy Holly's band members and that they perished along with him. That will be news to The Crickets who still perform,

The same with Hunter S Thompson - no mention of The Hells Angels novel that propelled him to fame - just a collection of cliches about gonzo journalism. This makes me wonder about the veracity of the magazine as well as the rest of the obits.

In balance, if you want pompous. ill-researched prose then this is the book for you.