DEATH BECOMES THEM

That's the title of the book I finished reading late last night. It's all about famous and infamous suicides. Everybody's in it: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Vincent van Gogh, Diane Arbus, Hemingway, Freud, Hitler, Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, Abbie Hoffman, etc. The author is Alix Strauss.

I know a depressed person should not be reading books about suicide. However, the book is wickedly morbid and oddly witty. One might even call it entertaining. How the author managed it, I'll never know. The woman is a genius. So I am not entirely to blame.

In truth, I'm grateful to have discovered this book. Suicide is a subject I have always been deeply curious about. However, I'm not terribly fond of academic books (I dropped out of college for very good reasons). Apart from The Savage God (a classic study of suicide, written by A. Alvarez), I was bored to death by everything I got my greedy little hands on. How can suicide ever be boring? That's what I wanted to know.

But now we have: DEATH BECOMES THEM. And it's an insightful page turner. I was hooked from the start. If you are curious about famous and notorious suicides, then this book deserves a long peek.

Resume

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

- Dorothy Parker

Nonfiction
Harper Paperback Original, 2009

Reader Rating: 9 /10

Review © 2011 by Dylan Mitchell