Morbid but gripping. I didn't care about some(Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, all those airplane crashes!) but others were enlightening- I never could keep the Rockefellers straight before now. ( )

4562. They Went That-a-way. by Malcolm Forbes with Jeff Bloch (read 21 Apr 2009) This book has sketches of how 150 mostly famous people died. Each sketch is less than two pages, and the prose is kind of Readers-Digest-like. But I read it from cover to cover and found every sketch quite interesting. One is dismayed how many of the famous were alcoholics or drug addicts, and so many led short lives as a result. I don't suppose there were 10 of the 150 I had never heard of before, and in fact some I have read biographies of, but even those accounts held one's interest. ( )

This was an interesting read---I read about 2/3 of it and skimmed the ones I wasn't familiar with. Some of my favorites were:

Funniest: Aeschylus
Weirdest: Chang & Eng
Most Endearing: Leslie Howard
Most Mysterious: Jim Morrison
Freakiest: Rasputin ( )

This is the sort of book I'm glad I read, but I'm glad I'm done. Many of the stories were interesting, but many were sad, even tragic endings to [famous] lives. I wonder how the causes of death in this book compare to the population at large (adjusted for time and geography). ( )