Customer Reviews

Encyclopedia of Famous Suicides

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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 worth, 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 less than 3 sentences long). Not only is this a minimal book, the entries are incredibly arbitrary, and at times questionable. Case in point: #8 on Professor Lester's list is the suicide of Ajax, the character from Greek mythology! Yes folks, amid actual suicide victims such as Hemmingway and Plath, Dr. Lester also includes fictional accounts. Heck, why stop there? Why not throw "Romeo and Juliette" in there? Othello? Obi Wan Kenobi? I think that you get my point...
Dr. Lester also likes to throw in many biblical and B.C. (before Christ) suicide references (e.g., Judas Iscariot, Abimelech, Ahithophel, "Haman's Daughter," etc.) - Once again, these are dubious and potentially fictional entries that blur the line of reality. Further, it seems that David Lester has no trouble including "possible" (i.e., unsubstantiated) suicides in his list as well (e.g., George Custer Armstrong, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, Alexander Hamilton). While some of the aforementioned entries are interesting (thus receiving 1.5 stars instead of just 1 star from me), I believe that not bracketing them into subcatories (such as "possible" suicides and "biblical" suicides") was nothing short of laziness on the part of the author; for $115 this book should have been a magnum opus - something it clearly is NOT. Finally, 4) THE ARBITRARY DECISION MAKING PROCESS - Out of the 334 entries in Lester's book, slightly less that half are associated with the 20th century; of this number, the majority listed are associated with the first half of the 1900's. It seems that stuffy ol' Professor "leather elbow patches" Lester prefers to eschew famous suicides of the modern era for more historical examples. And when he grudgingly lists someone from modern popular culture (a rarity), he seems to write somewhat disparagingly about them. A prime example of this occurs in the entry for Elvis Presley; the particular, non-neutral language Lester uses projects a sense of his bias against the deceased performer. Moreover, the aforementioned example is about as close as the author gets to popular musical culture; nowhere in this 1996 encyclopedia do we see entries such as Kurt Cobain, or "possible" suicides such as Sid Vicious, or Jim Morrison. This is really just the tip of the iceberg - Far from representing a comprehensive collection of famous suicides, Lester's book is full of glaring omissions. Just to give an idea of how flimsy and half-hearted the research was for this book, here's an example of 10 fairly well known suicides that happened prior to 1995 (Lester's book was published in 1996) that somehow were missed by Dr. Lester's crack-pot team of researchers:
1) Roy Raymond - Founder of Victoria's Secret; jumped to his death off of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1993. 2) R. Bud Dwyer - politician - shot himself in the mouth during a televised press conference in 1987. 3) Max Linder - French actor - made suicide pact with his wife in 1925; fenestrated veins in his arms and injected morphine. 4) Dan White - former San Francisco policeman and member of the S.F. board of directors - known for the infamous "Twinkie defense" in his trial following the assassinations of S.F. mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk - committed suicide in 1985 via carbon monoxide poisoning. 5) Alberto Santos Dumont - early pioneer of aviation - hanged himself in 1932. 6) Phil Ochs - American singer/songwriter - suicide by hanging in 1976. 7) Herve Villechaize - known internationally for role of "Tattoo" on the hit TV series `Fantasy Island' - shot himself in 1993. 8) Forrest H. Anderson - Governor of Montana from 1969 to 1973; died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1989. 9) Kurt Cobain - lead singer/guitarist of rock band Nirvana; died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in 1994. 10) Dalida - world-famous singer/actress - died from barbiturate overdose in 1987.

This is just a minor sample of what was missed by Lester and his team; even by 1996 research standards, it's painfully obvious just how sub-par, arbitrary, and lacking the research was.
So...the question remains, who is actually purchasing this book at the $115 retail price? (I found my copy for $10 plus shipping on Amazon and I still feel ripped off!) The best guess that I can make is that this may have been a required college course text (probably for one of Professor Lester's classes), and that students were bilked out of there parents' hard earned money. A handful of university libraries were also probably suckered into purchasing this shill of a book - all to feed the coffers for some project of primary interest for Dr. Lester.

Steer clear of this book! Don't give your hard earned money to this greedy author and his cohorts!