Customer Reviews

Immortal Words: History's Most Memorable Quotations and the Stories Behind Them

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This work is not exactly what it says it is. It does not in every one of its article highlight or even give the last words of the person. For many of the three hundred seventy stories of the end of the person's life it does. Essentially what it does is aim to tell the story of the end of the person's life and work in an interesting way. And most often in this book it succeeds.

In fact I found the book an exceptionally interesting one. When it tells of the final day of Martin Luther King it gives us his last great speech in which he speaks not knowing whether he as a person will reach the Promised Land, but knowing 'we as a people' will reach the Promised Land'. When he writes about Virginia Woolf he gives us her suicide note a painfully moving document. In it she apologizes to her husband Leonard Woolf and comments on how great a happiness they had, and how no one could have been better to her than him.

Breverton is an exceptionally good story- teller and simply knows how to provide information which is interesting. If I have an objection about the book it is that he includes the last moments of some of the monsters of human history. I would have preferred not to see them here. There is also of course a certain bias in the selection and an overdose of the English.

But on the whole a truly outstanding piece of work.