Robert K. Elder

A collection like this ought to carry some kind of weight of repetition, but it needs uniformity for that, and there isn't enough of it here. Of course historical versus modern last words are going to be differently recorded and reported; that's inevitable. But some of these are "last" last words ("Are you sure you're doing that right?") and some of them are written statements; some of them are clearly more accurate than others; and of course they've all been selected out of a much larger pool, but there's no indication on the part of the editor how they were selected. Without that level of consistency from which to compare, this book can't be anything other than the morbid collection the author claims to want to avoid.… (altro)