The Browser's Book of Endings: The End of Practically Everything and Everybody (Paperback)

~ Charles Panati (Author) "IN A BOOK DEVOTED TO ENDINGS, it seems fitting to begin with death, life's ultimate ending-from a personal standpoint the most important ending of all..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, White House, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

With a New Preface on the End of the World

Charles Panati, America's favorite gatherer of origins, now offers the last word on how people, places, and things of all sorts have met their ends through the centuries. From famous presidents to frightening epidemics, from ancient extinctions to vanished vogues, from bizarre last wills to the death styles of the rich and renowned, The Browser's Book of Endings presents the amusing, the surprising, and the generally little-known stories behind the terminations of practically everything and everybody. Illustrated with more than 100 drawings, diagrams, and archival photographs, with an extensive reference list and index, this is the most readable and complete compendium of deliciously trivial and profound facts about history's endings.

1. What were Oscar Wilde's last words?
2. What caused the extinction of the Dodo bird?
3. How did Belle Starr meet her death?
4. Who was the last great castrata (castrated male soprano singer)?
5. When was drawing and quartering banned in England?

***

Answers: 1. "I am dying as I've lived: beyond my means." 2. Introduction of Dutch colonials and their animals to Mauritius. 3. Ambushed and shot twice by her son and sometime lover. 4. Giovanni Velluti (1780-1761). 5. 1870.

About the Author

Charles Panati, a former physicist and science editor of Newsweek, is the author of fourteen books. He lives in West Sayville, New York.

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (December 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014028690X
• ISBN-13: 978-0140286908
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #818,676 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Death, Disease and Extinctions with Wit and Style, January 19, 2000

By	Charles hudson (West Sayville, New York USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

After writing six books about origins of things, Panati now offers a fascinating volume on endings: Past Sex Practices, Species' Extinctions, Last Wills and Testaments of American Presidents, History's Greatest Epidemics, Vanished Medical Practices, Celebrities' Famous Last Words and Wishes, Death Sytles of the Rich and Renown, The Origin of Cemeteries, and why everything that's living must eventually die. Fun stuff. A book I'll cherish to my dying day.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A decade later, a great book of 'endings' is revived, May 5, 2001

By	Winthrop Harrison "winharrison" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It is truly wonderful to see Charles Panati's work back in print. There was a decade-long spell where all of his lively, meticulous and engrossing work was unavailable. This collection is his best, and is finally back in print. I'm already mailing copies to my friends. The sheer variety and scope of this (long but never dull) book is a brilliant display. It's not just the 'last words' of celebrities, war heros, presidents and kings. Or the sobering list of incredible but extinct creatures - the Steller Sea Cow, the Passenger Pigeon, the comical/doomed Dodo, the 7-foot New Zealand Moa bird - it's all here. Even abandoned burial practices (Zoroastrians leaving corpses on 15-foot platforms to be exposed to the elements/birds, or the French placing millions of skeletons in the catacombs of Paris). But there's so much more - catastrophic yet now forgotten plagues, U.S. Presidential wills (what DID Abe Lincoln leave behind?...), and fascinating stories of bizarre and ineffective medical practices that have passed into history, curing no one. If you've read this far, you want this book. I want you to have it too. Buy it, it's great.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Endings Can Be Fun, November 20, 2000

By	Ricky Hunter (New York City, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The Browser's Book of Endings (by Charles Panati) proves that endings can be fun, if done correctly. This book is filled with much fun facts on death, disease and extinctions (among other gloomy subjects) yet it is completely and morbidly fascinating. I will even confess to not browsing through it as strongly recommended by the title but instead launching myself into it and reading it from cover to cover. It brought me back to my heady childhood days glued to such founts of wisdom as the Book of Lists and the People's Almanac. The humour in the book was also a delighful suprise (and a much needed release from all of the doom and gloom). A fun time was had by all.