Title:
How Did They Die?
Author:
Norman Donaldson
Publisher:
St Martin's Paperbacks, 1989
ISBN:
0-312-39488-8

I never cease to be amazed at the fascination people have with death. It is a treasure trove of legend, urban and otherwise. Particularly when the dead person was famous.

True, many so-called famous persons died producing thoroughly boring legends. Rock stars should never die, just so that we can be saved the boredom of having newbies post yet another Jim Morrison legend. But some famous people really need to be considered in death as well as in life.

After all, many of us act under the delusion that we leave that behind which endows us with a kind of immortality. And the more immortal these people are, the more their deaths fascinate us.

As the title implies, How Did They Die? Volume 2 is a sequel to an earlier effort by the authors. Norman Donaldson, author of Die?, states in his preface that his wife, Betty, was the driving force behind this and their previous collaboration. He also mentions that she died recently (1988) during an operation. He says nothing about irony.

The authors use a number of sources and biographies. But only in cases where the bulk of the information comes from a single source do they name the author and date published. It is a given from earlier experience in AFU that even careful scholarship allows legends to creep into work like this.

The book is organized in alphabetical order of the name of the corpus. There is no index, which is, in my opinion, a serious lack in a work like this. It includes names nearly everyone can be expected to be familiar with, like Patrick Henry, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, or Joseph Stalin. Other names are more obscure, and known only to extremely well read individuals like myself: Hilaire Belloc, Roger Casement, or Anthony Trollope. It is a "lively" collection of saints and sinners, heroes, poets, and villains.

I found it truly amazing how many people who seemed to loom larger than life died miserably, wasting away from disease, tortured by medical quackery, or murdered by their fellow man. Very few died as they lived. James Cook (whose story was known to me before I read this book) is one of the few exceptions. And Isadora Duncan, who was strangled by her own scarf, riding in one of those fancy cars. Or Thoreau, who died surrounded by the scent of hyacinths and (possibly) thinking of his current paper on the Main woods.

The book is filled with final words, details of the body's disposal, and medical jargon regarding the cause of death. Apparently, George Herbert Walker Bush was not nearly the first to monkey around with venerable skulls and stuff. And lots of pets mourn their owners' deaths.

Some of the stories reek of legend. The death of Louis XVI, for instance, was always surrounded by legend, and the source, A Journal of the Terror, S. Scott (ed.), 1955, used by the Donaldsons for this article illustrates nothing if not that any ten witnesses to the execution saw ten different events. Yet the article reflects none of this uncertainty, and blithely quotes the famous phrase "May my blood cement the happiness of Fr-," claimed to have been the king's last words, without any qualifications.

Hannibal's death, 2000 years ago, is described as if these accounts can actually be taken seriously. The location of this alpine campaigner's body is not even known, yet the events leading to his reported suicide are told as fact, as if the authors were there to see it all. No mention is made of the idea that any other event but suicide might have caused more trouble than a living Hannibal. (It is sort of a classic "Lights Out!" story, where people make clever assumptions about the dead person's state of mind, even though there is nothing the stiff left behind to back up the assertions.)

The story of the death of one of the ancients, Archimedes, does reflect the lack of certainty regarding tales of their demise, as it lists two conflicting accounts by Plutarch. Davy Crockett, who has a number of conflicting descriptions of his death given, is also one of the more entertaining items in the book.

Some of the stories are detection accounts. Alexander I, Tsar of Russia, may not have died on November 20, 1825. Instead, a man calling himself Fyodor Kuzmich, who eventually died on February 1, 1864, may have been the former Tsar, living incognito amongst his former subjects.

Or the story of Jan Masaryk, a popular politician in Czechoslovakia (yes, kiddies, there once was such a country), who was at first said to have committed suicide, and then, under pressure admitted to maybe have suffered a fatal accident, when there appears to be a lot of evidence (collected by biased people, possibly) which indicates an assassination by defenestration. A truly fun read.

Of AFU fame may be Jeremy Bentham, the mummified relic of University College, London. (The Donaldsons say merely that the mummy is on public display, nothing about attending any board meetings.) Then there is Horatio Nelson, who, as we all well know, was interred in a casket filled with brandy until he could be brought back to England. (There is no mention of the origin of any clever sayings, or of the amount of brandy left in the casket. The body was perfectly preserved, though.) Rodale really did die while taping a segment of the Dick Cavett Show. And as Girolamo Savonarola's body was burned his arm seemed to move according to witnesses. And Haydn's death was rumored a year before he actually died, to the extent that he offered to go to Paris and conduct his own requiem.

I did not find references to books bound in human skin, or male genitals of unusual size (M.G.O.U.S). I did look (for references, I mean).

The book scores a four on the AFU bookshelf criteria. It is entertaining, and most items seem to be accurate enough as they go, but the lack of precise footnoting, the inclusion of uncritical material, and the sore lack of an index make it little more than a conversation starter.