Review Detail

If you’re looking for one of those stale, moth-eaten, run-of-the-mill history books to fill your idle hours, How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous, by Georgia Bragg, isn’t the book for you.

How They Croaked examines the lives (and putrid deaths) of famous figures from yester-year: Columbus, King Tut, Beethoven, Charles Darwin, and Edgar Allan Poe, just to name a few. It begins with details about each person’s early life and finishes by outlining each knife-riddled, maggot-infested or bacteria-festered demise.

I love this book! It’s well-organized, meticulously-detailed, and full of tidbits and asides that teach you a thing or two (or three) about the medical ignorance of yester-year, even as you double over in side-splitting laughter. You’ll learn how Beethoven’s doctors drilled a hole in his stomach and stuck a hose in it; why Charles Dickens walked in circles and threw raging fits; and why King Tut’s embalmers didn’t preserve his brain. This and other gruesome information is offered in stomach-churning chunks, but is softened quite nicely by the quaintly entertaining artwork of artist Kevin O’Malley.

I do recommend this book to history-lovers young and old, but I warn you, it’s not for the faint-hearted. Bragg even describes it as “pretty much one train wreck after another.” So if you can get past the putricity (I made that word up!) of it all, you’ll absolutely love How They Croaked, by Georgia Bragg.