The Book of the Dead

The team behind the _New York Times_ bestseller _The Book of General

Ignorance_ turns conventional biography on its head—and shakes out the good

stuff.

* * *

Following their Herculean—or is it Sisyphean?—efforts to save the living from

ignorance, the two wittiest Johns in the English language turn their attention

to the dead.

As the authors themselves say, “The first thing that strikes you about the

Dead is just how many of them there are.” Helpfully, Lloyd and Mitchinson have

employed a simple—but ruthless—criterion for inclusion: the dead person has to

be interesting.

Here, then, is a dictionary of the dead, an encyclopedia of the embalmed.

Ludicrous in scope, whimsical in its arrangement, this wildly entertaining

tome presents pithy and provocative biographies of the no-longer-living from

the famous to the undeservedly and—until now—permanently obscure. Spades in

hand, Lloyd and Mitchinson have dug up everything embarrassing, fascinating,

and downright weird about their subjects’ lives and added their own uniquely

irreverent observations.

Organized by capricious categories—such as dead people who died virgins, who

kept pet monkeys, who lost limbs, whose corpses refused to stay put—the dearly

departed, from the inventor of the stove to a cross-dressing, bear-baiting

female gangster finally receive the epitaphs they truly deserve.

Discover:

* Why Freud had a lifelong fear of trains

* The one thing that really made Isaac Newton laugh

* How Catherine the Great really died (no horse was involved)

Much like the country doctor who cured smallpox (he’s in here), Lloyd and

Mitchinson have the perfect antidote for anyone out there dying of boredom.

_The Book of the Dead_ —like life itself—is hilarious, tragic, bizarre, and

amazing. You may never pass a graveyard again without chuckling.

_From the Hardcover edition._