Encyclopedia of Famous Suicides [Hardcover]

David Lester (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 149 pages
• Publisher: Nova Science Pub Inc; 1 edition (January 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560724137
• ISBN-13: 978-1560724131
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,460,434 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in London in 1942 and slept in an air raid shelter for my first three years. I wanted to be a physicist, but I got my BA at Cambridge University in psychology. I emigrated to the USA in 1964 for graduate study with Abraham Maslow at Brandeis University. I've researched and written about suicide since then, but also about topics such as murder, the death penalty, life after death and the fear of death. I have a badly written, unpublished detective story (on www.drdavidlester.net), so I decided that I had better stick to scholarly writing.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars A serious waste of money!!! 1.5 stars, January 25, 2012

By 

Red Xala "~23~" (Minneapolis, MN USA (Earth)) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Encyclopedia of Famous Suicides (Hardcover)

I'm incredibly curious as to how this book manages to stay in print. Anyone interested in this topic would be better off searching the internet for information rather that spending $115 for this insulting excuse of a book.

Let's analyze this thing: 1)FRONT COVER DESIGN - even by mid 1990's standards, this is a very minimal graphic design; a very slapdash, get it done "quick and cheap" look to it. For a book costing $115, you would think that the author and the publisher would provide a much more poignant and thought provoking piece of artwork that would reflect the heaviness of the topic covered. Apparently this concept was of little concern to author David Lester! 2)THE AUTHOR - If you do a "Google search" for David Lester, you'll find that "David Lester, Ph.D., has achieved worldwide recognition as a leading authority on suicide. He is a prolific author, researcher and past president of the International Association for Suicide Prevention...Dr. Lester is recipient of the Dublin Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement from the American Association of Suicidology. He is currently Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Suicide, a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Advancing Suicide Prevention magazine, and a professor of Psychology at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey." (reprinted from 'The Secular Web'). Okay, that's swell, great...So, for a book with a retail cost of $115, one may actually think that the author (who, I reiterate, is an "expert in the field of Suicidology") might consider crafting a well-written introduction or preface for his outlandishly priced book. Once again, however, good ol' Professor Lester didn't consider it necessary to give us our money's work, and no introduction is given. (However, he did manager to muster a two sentence "thank you statement" to his colleagues who assisted with the research of the book). 3)THE RESEARCH - So, for $115 retail, what do we actually get in this book? Answer: 334 alphabetical entries covered in less that 140 pages of topic related text (roughly 3 entries per page, with some entries being only 3 or 4 sentences long). Not only is this a minimal book, the entries are incredibly arbitrary, and at times questionable.