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The Quite Interesting Ignorant Books #4
The Book of the Dead: Lives of the Justly Famous and the Undeservedly Obscure
The team behind the New York Times bestseller The Book of General Ignorance turns conventional biography on its head-and shakes out the good stuff.
Following their Herculean-or is it Sisyphean?-efforts to save the living from ignorance, the two wittiest Johns in the English language turn their attention to the dead.
As the authors themselves say, “The first thing that strikes you about the Dead is just how many of them there are.” Helpfully, Lloyd and Mitchinson have employed a simple—but ruthless—criterion for inclusion: the dead person has to be interesting.
Here, then, is a dictionary of the dead, an encyclopedia of the embalmed. Ludicrous in scope, whimsical in its arrangement, this wildly entertaining tome presents pithy and provocative biographies of the no-longer-living from the famous to the undeservedly and—until now—permanently obscure. Spades in hand, Lloyd and Mitchinson have dug up everything embarrassing, fascinating, and downright weird about their subjects’ lives and added their own uniquely irreverent observations.
Organized by capricious categories—such as dead people who died virgins, who kept pet monkeys, who lost limbs, whose corpses refused to stay put—the dearly departed, from the inventor of the stove to a cross-dressing, bear-baiting female gangster finally receive the epitaphs they truly deserve.
Discover:
* Why Freud had a lifelong fear of trains
* The one thing that really made Isaac Newton laugh
* How Catherine the Great really died (no horse was involved)
Much like the country doctor who cured smallpox (he’s in here), Lloyd and Mitchinson have the perfect antidote for anyone out there dying of boredom. The Book of the Dead-like life itself-is hilarious, tragic, bizarre, and amazing. You may never pass a graveyard again without chuckling.
Following their Herculean-or is it Sisyphean?-efforts to save the living from ignorance, the two wittiest Johns in the English language turn their attention to the dead.
As the authors themselves say, “The first thing that strikes you about the Dead is just how many of them there are.” Helpfully, Lloyd and Mitchinson have employed a simple—but ruthless—criterion for inclusion: the dead person has to be interesting.
Here, then, is a dictionary of the dead, an encyclopedia of the embalmed. Ludicrous in scope, whimsical in its arrangement, this wildly entertaining tome presents pithy and provocative biographies of the no-longer-living from the famous to the undeservedly and—until now—permanently obscure. Spades in hand, Lloyd and Mitchinson have dug up everything embarrassing, fascinating, and downright weird about their subjects’ lives and added their own uniquely irreverent observations.
Organized by capricious categories—such as dead people who died virgins, who kept pet monkeys, who lost limbs, whose corpses refused to stay put—the dearly departed, from the inventor of the stove to a cross-dressing, bear-baiting female gangster finally receive the epitaphs they truly deserve.
Discover:
* Why Freud had a lifelong fear of trains
* The one thing that really made Isaac Newton laugh
* How Catherine the Great really died (no horse was involved)
Much like the country doctor who cured smallpox (he’s in here), Lloyd and Mitchinson have the perfect antidote for anyone out there dying of boredom. The Book of the Dead-like life itself-is hilarious, tragic, bizarre, and amazing. You may never pass a graveyard again without chuckling.
434 pages, Hardcover
First published March 5, 2015
149 people are currently reading
1945 people want to read
About the author
John Lloyd
224 books138 followersJohn Hardress Wilfred Lloyd is an English television and radio comedy producer and writer. His television work includes Not the Nine O'Clock News, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Spitting Image, Blackadder and QI. He is currently the presenter of BBC Radio 4's The Museum of Curiosity.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 195 reviews
April 8, 2020
THIS DBR IS DEDICATED TO EH!!! WHO IS THE BEST AT SO MANY THINGS, BUT MOSTLY AT STUFFING BOXES. AND BEING AWESOME IN GENERAL. THIS DBR IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY WINE AND GIRL SCOUT COOKIES: DO-SI-DOS ARE PAIRED WITH A DELIGHTFUL BORDEAUX BECAUSE I AM SUPER-CLASSY.
i have a very small brain. well, maybe it is regular-sized, but it doesn't hold a lot of information. which is i think why my book reviews of late have been so dull - i am reading more quickly than i can review, and by the time i am getting around to writing a review, weeks have passed and many books have jostled in between myself and my memory of the book i am reviewing and there is just too much clutter. stupid brain.
but that is why a book like this is just great for me. snippets!! brief biographical sketches!! information i can digest without getting all bogged down in facts and dates. (dates are worse than directions to me - the brain doesn't even bother trying to absorb them)
i have read plenty of books like this before - where there is a lotta information about people i never cared about enough to read an entire biography about, but a paragraph or two is fine. this book just does it better than most of them. i think part of it is the way the people are grouped. one chapter covers "famous people who kept monkeys as pets." this is not how oliver cromwell is usually remembered, so i was more interested than if the chapter had been called "lord protectors of england" or zzzzz...(however, and spoiler alert - it wasn't actually his pet monkey, but the pet monkey of his grandfather that almost murrrrderrred him when he was an infant. "people nearly murdered by other people's pet monkeys" would probably not have enough (famous) people to fill a chapter. alas.)
the best thing about books like these are that they lead you to other books. i now own a copy of Cassandra by florence nightingale, which virginia woolf called (as i have already shared with elizabeth) "a shriek of nervous agony." phoar - can't wait to get into that one!! and also, i am going to learn all i can about mary kingsley, who was this badass explorer and adventurer, one of the few victorian explorers to live in africa and not be a total racist. and definitely the only woman to do so.
plus, i love any book that has a section on byron (he is included in the "dead, absent, or impossible fathers" chapter along with isaac newton, hans christian andersen, and - ironically - ada lovelace.)
i read this book very slowly over the course of several months, and i think that's the best way to read a book like this - to just dip into it occasionally and try to let the (verysmall) brain absorb the details and find new avenues of interest. for example, i may just read a richard feynman book because even though he writes about zzzzzzzzz, i might have fallen in love with him a little because of this book, and maybe i would make the effort to keep the brain receptive while i was reading. and that's not just the girl scout cookies talking!
so - yeah - thumbs up to this book - i will probably browse through it again on nights when i am too drowsy to actually read, but just want something to do with my eyes.
okay - gotta go watch top chef and yell at the teevee now.
because i am a classy broad.
come to my blog!
i have a very small brain. well, maybe it is regular-sized, but it doesn't hold a lot of information. which is i think why my book reviews of late have been so dull - i am reading more quickly than i can review, and by the time i am getting around to writing a review, weeks have passed and many books have jostled in between myself and my memory of the book i am reviewing and there is just too much clutter. stupid brain.
but that is why a book like this is just great for me. snippets!! brief biographical sketches!! information i can digest without getting all bogged down in facts and dates. (dates are worse than directions to me - the brain doesn't even bother trying to absorb them)
i have read plenty of books like this before - where there is a lotta information about people i never cared about enough to read an entire biography about, but a paragraph or two is fine. this book just does it better than most of them. i think part of it is the way the people are grouped. one chapter covers "famous people who kept monkeys as pets." this is not how oliver cromwell is usually remembered, so i was more interested than if the chapter had been called "lord protectors of england" or zzzzz...(however, and spoiler alert - it wasn't actually his pet monkey, but the pet monkey of his grandfather that almost murrrrderrred him when he was an infant. "people nearly murdered by other people's pet monkeys" would probably not have enough (famous) people to fill a chapter. alas.)
the best thing about books like these are that they lead you to other books. i now own a copy of Cassandra by florence nightingale, which virginia woolf called (as i have already shared with elizabeth) "a shriek of nervous agony." phoar - can't wait to get into that one!! and also, i am going to learn all i can about mary kingsley, who was this badass explorer and adventurer, one of the few victorian explorers to live in africa and not be a total racist. and definitely the only woman to do so.
plus, i love any book that has a section on byron (he is included in the "dead, absent, or impossible fathers" chapter along with isaac newton, hans christian andersen, and - ironically - ada lovelace.)
i read this book very slowly over the course of several months, and i think that's the best way to read a book like this - to just dip into it occasionally and try to let the (verysmall) brain absorb the details and find new avenues of interest. for example, i may just read a richard feynman book because even though he writes about zzzzzzzzz, i might have fallen in love with him a little because of this book, and maybe i would make the effort to keep the brain receptive while i was reading. and that's not just the girl scout cookies talking!
so - yeah - thumbs up to this book - i will probably browse through it again on nights when i am too drowsy to actually read, but just want something to do with my eyes.
okay - gotta go watch top chef and yell at the teevee now.
because i am a classy broad.
come to my blog!
August 30, 2017
Found this on the shelves in a hotel I was staying at and picked it up out of curiosity. It´s a selection of biographies of interesting dead people - hence the title - organised into chapters such as "unhappy childhoods" "what comes next" etc. I read it cover to cover in two days and it fell into my suitcase to keep as a reference book. If you think you´d be interested in concise, erudite biographies of Freud, Newton, Pessoa, Genghis Khan, Catherine the Great, Kinsey, Tallulah Bankhead, Lady Hamilton, Buckminster Fuller and many more, then this book is worth seeking out.
September 1, 2018
At its best, this book introduced me to fascinating figures I knew nothing about - Tesla for example has to be one of history's most underrated individuals - he was brilliant, quirky and I can't wait to read more about him. At its worst though, you feel like you are reading the same 5 page biography over and over - grew up impoverished, father died young, achieved success or fame, had weird sexual habits, died penniless. The authors seem very influenced by Freud - he's covered here too - and I got tired of them dissecting the sexual habits of almost every subject in their book. Overall uneven, but probably worth reading for the 5 or 6 gems that lie within.
July 21, 2015
There's a cute statistical argument for predicting when the End of Days will occur, it goes something like this. Suppose you reach into my pocket and pull out some balls. Oi, no giggling, this is serious maths. I've got a number of balls in my pocket, and the balls are numbered 1, 2, 3, etc. up to the number of balls. If I have ten balls they're numbered one to ten, if I have a thousand balls they're numbered one to a thousand, if I have a billion balls then I have big pockets.
I don't tell you how many balls I have, but I will let you take three of my balls. So you dive in and pluck out three balls, and they have on them three numbers, for argument's sake let's say they're numbered 6, 7, and 46. Your task is to estimate how many balls I had in my pocket to start with. Clearly there must have been at least 46 since you found the 46th ball. But presumably not lots more than 46. If there were, say, a billion balls then it'd be incredibly strange that all the ones you found were so low in number. A statistical argument suggests that it's most likely there were about 60 balls given these three draws. If you're interested I used Wolfram Alpha to simulate the experiment and get those numbers, and I simulated it with 56 balls. Not bad, eh?
What's this got to do with the End of Days? Well replace balls with humans. Every human that's ever lived and that will ever live was/will be born in some order, so let's dispense with these illogical “names” we all have and just give everyone a number based on when we were born, a kind of human serial number. The first ever mutant homo sapiens sapiens to pop out of a startled homo sapiens idaltu will be number 1. You and I are numbered somewhere around 100 billion. And so on. Now suppose humanity, as a species, somehow manages to survive everything that nature, the Universe, and itself can throw at it. Suppose that humanity survives for billions more years, colonises the galaxy, and eventually numbers in the trillions. By the time we reach that stage the total number of humans that have ever lived will be in the quadrillions, maybe the quintillions. That's a lot of illions. If that's the case then the chances of me, number 100 billion, being alive right now is vanishingly small. Like me having a thousand numbered balls in my pocket and you picking out three balls numbered less than 1.
One explanation for this is that you and I are statistical anomalies, freaks living on the very edge of the bell curve. We're a hundred fair coin tosses coming up as a hundred heads: utterly implausible but not absolutely impossible. Another explanation is that we're nothing special. We were born at a statistically typical time. If that's the case then we can use the same maths as with the balls-in-my-pocket situation to determine that there won't be quadrillions of humans in the future, in fact the human race will die out in about 10 000 years sometime around the birth of human number 1.2 trillion.
It's an interesting argument because it's obviously totally wrong, but it's not difficult to learn enough maths to corroborate the argument, while spotting the problem with the statistics is rather more tricky. Still, if you believe the argument then you can accept that, roughly speaking, there are currently ten billion living humans, a hundred billion dead humans, and a thousand billion humans yet to be born. This QI Book of the Dead is a work of non-fiction so looks at a few dozen of those hundred billion dead humans. (Books about the humans that haven't been born yet are called “fiction”. Books about still living humans straddle the line between the two genres.)
The brief biographies get a little samey (kid overcomes adversity to become amazing adult – if they're male then they're probably gay) but it's not the authors' fault if we humans tend to fall into the same patterns over and over. Besides, the book is best dipped into sporadically rather than devoured in a single sitting. And (quite) interesting though it is, it's really a gateway book. You know the kind of thing. You're at a party one night and suddenly someone starts passing it around. “Go on,” they whisper, “just give it a little try.” Peer pressure conquers all so you take in a few pages, trying not to inhale. Then suddenly: BANG. You're reading a thousand page treatise on Ignácz Trebitsch Lincoln and a Richard Feynmann book on quantum electrodynamics. You have been warned.
I don't tell you how many balls I have, but I will let you take three of my balls. So you dive in and pluck out three balls, and they have on them three numbers, for argument's sake let's say they're numbered 6, 7, and 46. Your task is to estimate how many balls I had in my pocket to start with. Clearly there must have been at least 46 since you found the 46th ball. But presumably not lots more than 46. If there were, say, a billion balls then it'd be incredibly strange that all the ones you found were so low in number. A statistical argument suggests that it's most likely there were about 60 balls given these three draws. If you're interested I used Wolfram Alpha to simulate the experiment and get those numbers, and I simulated it with 56 balls. Not bad, eh?
What's this got to do with the End of Days? Well replace balls with humans. Every human that's ever lived and that will ever live was/will be born in some order, so let's dispense with these illogical “names” we all have and just give everyone a number based on when we were born, a kind of human serial number. The first ever mutant homo sapiens sapiens to pop out of a startled homo sapiens idaltu will be number 1. You and I are numbered somewhere around 100 billion. And so on. Now suppose humanity, as a species, somehow manages to survive everything that nature, the Universe, and itself can throw at it. Suppose that humanity survives for billions more years, colonises the galaxy, and eventually numbers in the trillions. By the time we reach that stage the total number of humans that have ever lived will be in the quadrillions, maybe the quintillions. That's a lot of illions. If that's the case then the chances of me, number 100 billion, being alive right now is vanishingly small. Like me having a thousand numbered balls in my pocket and you picking out three balls numbered less than 1.
One explanation for this is that you and I are statistical anomalies, freaks living on the very edge of the bell curve. We're a hundred fair coin tosses coming up as a hundred heads: utterly implausible but not absolutely impossible. Another explanation is that we're nothing special. We were born at a statistically typical time. If that's the case then we can use the same maths as with the balls-in-my-pocket situation to determine that there won't be quadrillions of humans in the future, in fact the human race will die out in about 10 000 years sometime around the birth of human number 1.2 trillion.
It's an interesting argument because it's obviously totally wrong, but it's not difficult to learn enough maths to corroborate the argument, while spotting the problem with the statistics is rather more tricky. Still, if you believe the argument then you can accept that, roughly speaking, there are currently ten billion living humans, a hundred billion dead humans, and a thousand billion humans yet to be born. This QI Book of the Dead is a work of non-fiction so looks at a few dozen of those hundred billion dead humans. (Books about the humans that haven't been born yet are called “fiction”. Books about still living humans straddle the line between the two genres.)
The brief biographies get a little samey (kid overcomes adversity to become amazing adult – if they're male then they're probably gay) but it's not the authors' fault if we humans tend to fall into the same patterns over and over. Besides, the book is best dipped into sporadically rather than devoured in a single sitting. And (quite) interesting though it is, it's really a gateway book. You know the kind of thing. You're at a party one night and suddenly someone starts passing it around. “Go on,” they whisper, “just give it a little try.” Peer pressure conquers all so you take in a few pages, trying not to inhale. Then suddenly: BANG. You're reading a thousand page treatise on Ignácz Trebitsch Lincoln and a Richard Feynmann book on quantum electrodynamics. You have been warned.
April 29, 2016
Aslında içinde çok keyifli ve değerli bilgiler olan, ama bemim elimde 1 ay boyunca sürünen, belki bu kadar uzun olmasa daha rahat ve keyifle okunacak bir kitap. Bence.
July 12, 2025
This book explores the lives of the famous and the not-so-famous from history. Some of the people most of us are familiar with and others were new to me. An interesting book to dip in and out of.
February 5, 2025
I read the author's 'The Book of General Ignorance' a few years ago, and liked Lloyd's writing style and material. This book is a collection of mini-bios on a wide assortment of people. As the title says some are well-known and some are not. All are interesting, some more than others. The book includes a nice bibliography at the end for those wishing to do a deeper dive into the lives of the the people in the book.
October 23, 2015
I should preface this review by pointing out that this was the book that I started my 24-hour Dyslexia Action charity readathon with – for the first two and a half hours, I was finishing this off. It certainly isn’t a book that you’d want to read over and over again, nor a book that you could sit down and whizz through in one sitting, unless you were trying to raise money for charity by trying to read for 24 hours straight.
That said, it is a reasonably long read, but try not to be fooled by the blurb of the book which makes it sound as though it only talks about a dozen historical figures. It’s true that the book is broken up in to sections, and certain key figures like Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin take up more than their fair share of the manuscript, but it would be unfair to say that the book is all about them.
In fact, Lloyd and Mitchinson, the two writers who are behind the creation of Q.I. and a bunch of other well-known TV shows, have clearly done their research – more than that, they’ve done so much research that this book is brimming with the fruits of their labours, and I personally can’t see any way in which they could’ve improved it. There’s only so much you can fit in, with a given amount of words.
Theoretically, the book is split in to seven different sections, which focus on a different aspect of existence from bad starts in life to the relationships we have with our contemporaries and the eternal question of ‘what happens next?’ It makes for a fascinating read, the kind of book that you learn from all the way through despite it never setting out a formal agenda – the two authors dip from subject to subject with a natural ease, and despite it being a book of facts and historical figures, it seems to follow a consistent journey from start to finish.
If you’re fan of the Q.I. television series then you’re going to be a fan of this book, as well as the rest of the books that have been released since the show achieved mainstream recognition. They all follow a similar theme, focusing on anything that could conceivably be classified as ‘quite interesting‘. This book passes the test for sure, and I’d recommend it if you’re a keen reader and a pursuer of knowledge.
That said, it is a reasonably long read, but try not to be fooled by the blurb of the book which makes it sound as though it only talks about a dozen historical figures. It’s true that the book is broken up in to sections, and certain key figures like Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin take up more than their fair share of the manuscript, but it would be unfair to say that the book is all about them.
In fact, Lloyd and Mitchinson, the two writers who are behind the creation of Q.I. and a bunch of other well-known TV shows, have clearly done their research – more than that, they’ve done so much research that this book is brimming with the fruits of their labours, and I personally can’t see any way in which they could’ve improved it. There’s only so much you can fit in, with a given amount of words.
Theoretically, the book is split in to seven different sections, which focus on a different aspect of existence from bad starts in life to the relationships we have with our contemporaries and the eternal question of ‘what happens next?’ It makes for a fascinating read, the kind of book that you learn from all the way through despite it never setting out a formal agenda – the two authors dip from subject to subject with a natural ease, and despite it being a book of facts and historical figures, it seems to follow a consistent journey from start to finish.
If you’re fan of the Q.I. television series then you’re going to be a fan of this book, as well as the rest of the books that have been released since the show achieved mainstream recognition. They all follow a similar theme, focusing on anything that could conceivably be classified as ‘quite interesting‘. This book passes the test for sure, and I’d recommend it if you’re a keen reader and a pursuer of knowledge.
July 30, 2024
I loathed this book as a dishonest and trashy attempt to continue cashing in the QI bandwagon. It is worse than simplistic and superficial - it is actually offensive in its down right racist and simplistic giggling at funny foreigners behaving badly. Santa Anna may have been absurd but the loss of Texas was not his fault but the result of a collection of racist citizens of the USA trying to force slavery on a country which had abolished it. Smyrna did not burn because King Constantine I died from a monkey bite - it burnt because of the grandiose idiocies of a 'Greater Greece' policy which accepted the large scale massacre and expulsion of Muslims and which was the policy of PM Lloyd George and his supporters like Winston Churchill.
Leonardo da Vinci was not gay, he probably had lots of sex with members of his own sex, but as what it means to be 'gay' has changed dramatically since the term began to be used in 1969 and, it seems to me, idiotic to call someone who lived 500 before then 'gay'.
The Danish Royal family is not German - certainly less German then the Windsors were a generation ago - and probably before the first world war was one of the most anti German of Royal Houses, as was the Greek Royal family, not surprisingly as they were descended from a 'Danish' prince the brother of Queen Alexandra.
I could go on with the sloppy, careless, inaccurate and stupid mistakes in this volume - normally this would be nothing surprising, but the QI 'brand' is based on an idea of accuracy which this book just makes a mockery of.
Badly put together, a complete rip-off, and clearly the creation of marketing, rather than editorial, input. Avoid at all cost.
Leonardo da Vinci was not gay, he probably had lots of sex with members of his own sex, but as what it means to be 'gay' has changed dramatically since the term began to be used in 1969 and, it seems to me, idiotic to call someone who lived 500 before then 'gay'.
The Danish Royal family is not German - certainly less German then the Windsors were a generation ago - and probably before the first world war was one of the most anti German of Royal Houses, as was the Greek Royal family, not surprisingly as they were descended from a 'Danish' prince the brother of Queen Alexandra.
I could go on with the sloppy, careless, inaccurate and stupid mistakes in this volume - normally this would be nothing surprising, but the QI 'brand' is based on an idea of accuracy which this book just makes a mockery of.
Badly put together, a complete rip-off, and clearly the creation of marketing, rather than editorial, input. Avoid at all cost.
January 7, 2014
Stephen Fry calls this book “dead good” according to the cover text. And he’s right. It’s weird, odd, intriguing, absorbing and deathly good. It’s also a perfect reminder, to fiction readers like me, that biographies can be entertaining reads. It’s the sort of book where you’ll laugh quietly, then insist on telling some vital detail to whoever’s sitting nearby, then you’ll read on, and read aloud, and no one will wonder why. It’s full of strange and fascinating details. It’s classified and collected in such a curious way (dead people who kept monkeys perhaps) that you’ll never know what’s coming next. It’s well constructed with fascinating tie-ins and connections that really shouldn’t work. And it covers a world and a wealth of people who only have in common the fact that they’re dead. Study Catherine the Great’s sex life, imagine St. Cuthbert’s visions, spy on the discovery of a smallpox vaccine (and learn the reason, in passing, that it’s called vaccination), then follow the lives and times of many many more, justifiably famous or unjustifiably obscure. And enjoy!
Disclosure: One of my sons gave me this book for Christmas
Disclosure: One of my sons gave me this book for Christmas
November 26, 2010
If you are looking for something that is incredibly in-depth & neatly organized, then you should probably look elsewhere. If you want something that would be great to read at 10-15 seconds at a time then you'll like this read. It's great for the trivia buffs out there who want something quick to read while they're waiting for an appointment, killing a few minutes, or... otherwise indisposed.
The Book of the Dead collects information on various famous, infamous, & obscure people in neat little bite sized gulps. Fans of trivia will enjoy this book greatly, although others will wish that there was just a little more to each section. Some will find this book a little on the dry side, but there really is a wealth of knowledge to be had in this book.
My personal opinion? While I did enjoy the book it was just a little too dry for me. I'm glad I read it because it gave me a new perspective on some of my favorite historical people (such as Hans Christian Anderson). However it is one that I would recommend that people look it over in the bookstore before purchasing it.
3.5/5
The Book of the Dead collects information on various famous, infamous, & obscure people in neat little bite sized gulps. Fans of trivia will enjoy this book greatly, although others will wish that there was just a little more to each section. Some will find this book a little on the dry side, but there really is a wealth of knowledge to be had in this book.
My personal opinion? While I did enjoy the book it was just a little too dry for me. I'm glad I read it because it gave me a new perspective on some of my favorite historical people (such as Hans Christian Anderson). However it is one that I would recommend that people look it over in the bookstore before purchasing it.
3.5/5
March 6, 2022
No, just no!!!
These short "biographies" of famous dead people are nothing more than gossip, something you'd normally read in a tabloid. Not a well researched book. 😓 If you're here just for the dirt, maybe you'll find it entertaining, but honestly, I do not recommend reading it. The book makes several assumptions based solely on rumors.
For example, there's simply not enough evidence that Newton was gay. Yet the writers state it as a definite fact. The same goes for Leonardo da Vinci, Freud and especially Byron. So many inaccuracies, too many speculations, few facts. I was getting really annoyed, so I had to stop reading after Byron. 😓
These short "biographies" of famous dead people are nothing more than gossip, something you'd normally read in a tabloid. Not a well researched book. 😓 If you're here just for the dirt, maybe you'll find it entertaining, but honestly, I do not recommend reading it. The book makes several assumptions based solely on rumors.
For example, there's simply not enough evidence that Newton was gay. Yet the writers state it as a definite fact. The same goes for Leonardo da Vinci, Freud and especially Byron. So many inaccuracies, too many speculations, few facts. I was getting really annoyed, so I had to stop reading after Byron. 😓
September 7, 2017
was this well researched? no idea.
was the style of some chapters sometimes tabloid-like? yeah.
was i entertained by the entire book? absolutely.
was the style of some chapters sometimes tabloid-like? yeah.
was i entertained by the entire book? absolutely.
September 16, 2017
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2877321.html
From the makers of the quiz show QI, a collection of biographies of famous people, more or less tied together by themed chapters, very much going for the gosh-wow trivia, none of it all that memorable to be honest.
From the makers of the quiz show QI, a collection of biographies of famous people, more or less tied together by themed chapters, very much going for the gosh-wow trivia, none of it all that memorable to be honest.
November 23, 2017
Interesting read about famous, infamous and little known people who have in some way contributed or changed the way we live today. Now I’ll know the references made in the Big Bang Theory 😂
December 31, 2010
Out of the ninety billion humans that lived and died on this planet, the authors narrowed it down to just shy of 70 who whether famous or not, lived some of the most compelling lives you would ever want to read about. This was a fun book that allowed me to learn more about figures that though familiar with, I didn't know all that much about. Issac Newton, Ada Lovelace, Nikola Tesla, Tallulah Bankhead, and General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, are just some of the notable historical figures that I learned more about in this book than I ever did in high school or college.
As enjoyable as that is though, what I really loved about this book is that I was introduced to people I had never heard of before, but should have know about. I met Edward Jenner, an English doctor, who discovered a way to eradicate smallpox. This is a man we should have learned about in school or in college at least and I never heard of him until this book. I also met Mary Seacole, a Jamaican born woman who did so much to help out the troops during the Crimean War. She is a fascinating woman and I have every intention of hunting down her autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.
My reading wish list has grown quite a bit since I read this book. I've also added two books written by another woman I first met within these pages. Mary Kingsley was a one of the first women to explore Africa and considering she was from the Victorian era, that's quite a feat. She wrote two books, Travels in West Africa and West African Studies, and they are both books that I now want to read. I'm also going to see if I can find any work by the Portuguese write Fernando Pessoa. The man wrote, mainly unpublished even today, under a hundred different names. The most amazing thing is that the writing style was completely different for every name. I'm utterly fascinated by it and want to learn more.
This was a fun, engaging book that while not being able to give complex biographies of those humanized within it's pages, gives the reader a real sense of who these people were. At least for me, it gave me all the more reason to keep reading about them to find out even more.
As enjoyable as that is though, what I really loved about this book is that I was introduced to people I had never heard of before, but should have know about. I met Edward Jenner, an English doctor, who discovered a way to eradicate smallpox. This is a man we should have learned about in school or in college at least and I never heard of him until this book. I also met Mary Seacole, a Jamaican born woman who did so much to help out the troops during the Crimean War. She is a fascinating woman and I have every intention of hunting down her autobiography, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands.
My reading wish list has grown quite a bit since I read this book. I've also added two books written by another woman I first met within these pages. Mary Kingsley was a one of the first women to explore Africa and considering she was from the Victorian era, that's quite a feat. She wrote two books, Travels in West Africa and West African Studies, and they are both books that I now want to read. I'm also going to see if I can find any work by the Portuguese write Fernando Pessoa. The man wrote, mainly unpublished even today, under a hundred different names. The most amazing thing is that the writing style was completely different for every name. I'm utterly fascinated by it and want to learn more.
This was a fun, engaging book that while not being able to give complex biographies of those humanized within it's pages, gives the reader a real sense of who these people were. At least for me, it gave me all the more reason to keep reading about them to find out even more.
April 20, 2015
What connects this book to QI is the people involved (John Lloyd is a producer for the show, and John Mitchinson one of the researchers) and the incredible shoddiness of the research. The form doesn't bear much resemblance; it's just a series of white-washed, shallow biographical vignettes weakly tied together with per-chapter themes. To call this the work of Wikipedia historians would be insulting to Wikipedia; the Johns at best only skimmed the one or two sources they claim to have used for each vignette, and they both repeat common myths and invent new ones.†
I'm so fucking sick of books like this. I don't buy that they cultivate intellectual curiosity in readers regardless of their own accuracy or rigour (the Mythbusters defence); its brand of under-researched sensationalism is the exact opposite of intellectual curiosity, and all it's good for is giving assholes bullshit trivia to repeat at parties and frustrate their friends with.
This is not what research looks like. This is not what knowing for the sake of knowing looks like. Fucking stop it.
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† At one point, the claim is made that Genghis Khan adapted the Uighur (sic) alphabet to Mongolian, and that the Uyghur language was derived from Aramaic but that Aramaic, ``ironically'', never developed a written script (sic) of its own. In reality, Old Uyghur was a Turkic language and Aramaic is, of course, a Semitic one, and the Old Uyghur/Sogdian alphabet is a descendant of the Aramaic alphabet, which was one of the most widely used alphabets in the world for some 1,400 years.
This is so fucking trivial to fact-check that I suspect they deliberately planted it to give hostile reviewers something to feel smug about. If so, good job, guys.
I'm so fucking sick of books like this. I don't buy that they cultivate intellectual curiosity in readers regardless of their own accuracy or rigour (the Mythbusters defence); its brand of under-researched sensationalism is the exact opposite of intellectual curiosity, and all it's good for is giving assholes bullshit trivia to repeat at parties and frustrate their friends with.
This is not what research looks like. This is not what knowing for the sake of knowing looks like. Fucking stop it.
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† At one point, the claim is made that Genghis Khan adapted the Uighur (sic) alphabet to Mongolian, and that the Uyghur language was derived from Aramaic but that Aramaic, ``ironically'', never developed a written script (sic) of its own. In reality, Old Uyghur was a Turkic language and Aramaic is, of course, a Semitic one, and the Old Uyghur/Sogdian alphabet is a descendant of the Aramaic alphabet, which was one of the most widely used alphabets in the world for some 1,400 years.
This is so fucking trivial to fact-check that I suspect they deliberately planted it to give hostile reviewers something to feel smug about. If so, good job, guys.
February 1, 2011
Lloyd and Mitchison's book about famous dead people can be a little random. The authors' groupings can be a tad . . . whimsical, shall we say. I understand a chapter about famous people whose fathers were deadbeats. I can also get with a chapter about those rare famous people who are happy. But a chapter about famous people who owned monkeys? That left me scratching my head a bit.
However, that having been said, I enjoyed this book immensely. It's chock full of wonderfully trivial tidbits about scads of famous people - some of whom were a great deal more famous in their own time than they are now, and some who continue to be famous to this day (Sigmund Freud, Ben Franklin, and Henry Ford, just to name a few).
It was fascinating. I was never bored. And there were many moments when I laughed out loud.
However, that having been said, I enjoyed this book immensely. It's chock full of wonderfully trivial tidbits about scads of famous people - some of whom were a great deal more famous in their own time than they are now, and some who continue to be famous to this day (Sigmund Freud, Ben Franklin, and Henry Ford, just to name a few).
It was fascinating. I was never bored. And there were many moments when I laughed out loud.
November 5, 2010
Interesting read that YES I will be keeping on my shelves and grateful that it’s already in the hardback book format! History is fun but reading about the odd behaviors, quirks, and weirdness of famous dead people just makes it all the more fun and obviously memorable! Did you know that Catherine De Medici drilled a hole in her husband’s bedroom floor so she could spy on him and his lover to get “practical tips”?! CRAZY!
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August 6, 2011the second QI book i've read. while the first was just a bunch of random (yet quite interesting) facts, this is a who's who of random (yet quite interesting) dead people. even if you haven't heard of a lot of the people listed in this book, their life stories are often quite eye-opening, fascinating, illuminating, intriguing, and of course, interesting. :P
June 19, 2012
Very interesting book about many people I was already familiar with, and many others I was not. Love Tesla's reaction to Voltaire's writings: "I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of of black coffee per diem."
August 18, 2010
An enjoyable but necessarily cursory look at the lives, influences and legacy of over 30 notable and notorious people. Great to dip into, but to find anything in-depth you will need to progress to reading one of the full biographies (handily listed in a useful appendix).
November 29, 2011
An interesting book about a range of historical figures this wasn't as funny or fascinating as the previous QI books. Some of the biographies were a bit dry and slowed down the book.
Overall if you're a fan of the show or trivia books in general it's good for a read.
Overall if you're a fan of the show or trivia books in general it's good for a read.
August 25, 2015
What a great selection of wonderful, eccentric and great individuals are celebrated in this book. Among the long famous are many more obscure but fascinating characters who richly deserve to have their names raised from the obscurity into which they have fallen.
January 17, 2010
Deathly. Fun.
December 31, 2010
This was so good, and fun to read! So many interesting facts and peices of info that you DON'T read about in the History books. I loved it! Man... people are WHACKED!
May 6, 2017
I should preface this review by pointing out that this was the book that I started my 24-hour Dyslexia Action charity readathon with – for the first two and a half hours, I was finishing this off. It certainly isn’t a book that you’d want to read over and over again, nor a book that you could sit down and whizz through in one sitting, unless you were trying to raise money for charity by trying to read for 24 hours straight.
That said, it is a reasonably long read, but try not to be fooled by the blurb of the book which makes it sound as though it only talks about a dozen historical figures. It’s true that the book is broken up in to sections, and certain key figures like Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin take up more than their fair share of the manuscript, but it would be unfair to say that the book is all about them.
In fact, Lloyd and Mitchinson, the two writers who are behind the creation of Q.I. and a bunch of other well-known TV shows, have clearly done their research – more than that, they’ve done so much research that this book is brimming with the fruits of their labours, and I personally can’t see any way in which they could’ve improved it. There’s only so much you can fit in, with a given amount of words.
Theoretically, the book is split in to seven different sections, which focus on a different aspect of existence from bad starts in life to the relationships we have with our contemporaries and the eternal question of ‘what happens next?’ It makes for a fascinating read, the kind of book that you learn from all the way through despite it never setting out a formal agenda – the two authors dip from subject to subject with a natural ease, and despite it being a book of facts and historical figures, it seems to follow a consistent journey from start to finish.
If you’re fan of the Q.I. television series then you’re going to be a fan of this book, as well as the rest of the books that have been released since the show achieved mainstream recognition. They all follow a similar theme, focusing on anything that could conceivably be classified as ‘quite interesting‘. This book passes the test for sure, and I’d recommend it if you’re a keen reader and a pursuer of knowledge.
That said, it is a reasonably long read, but try not to be fooled by the blurb of the book which makes it sound as though it only talks about a dozen historical figures. It’s true that the book is broken up in to sections, and certain key figures like Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin take up more than their fair share of the manuscript, but it would be unfair to say that the book is all about them.
In fact, Lloyd and Mitchinson, the two writers who are behind the creation of Q.I. and a bunch of other well-known TV shows, have clearly done their research – more than that, they’ve done so much research that this book is brimming with the fruits of their labours, and I personally can’t see any way in which they could’ve improved it. There’s only so much you can fit in, with a given amount of words.
Theoretically, the book is split in to seven different sections, which focus on a different aspect of existence from bad starts in life to the relationships we have with our contemporaries and the eternal question of ‘what happens next?’ It makes for a fascinating read, the kind of book that you learn from all the way through despite it never setting out a formal agenda – the two authors dip from subject to subject with a natural ease, and despite it being a book of facts and historical figures, it seems to follow a consistent journey from start to finish.
If you’re fan of the Q.I. television series then you’re going to be a fan of this book, as well as the rest of the books that have been released since the show achieved mainstream recognition. They all follow a similar theme, focusing on anything that could conceivably be classified as ‘quite interesting‘. This book passes the test for sure, and I’d recommend it if you’re a keen reader and a pursuer of knowledge.
July 28, 2017
I both love and am slightly frustrated by books like this. The former because it depicts some fascinating lives of people I know little about and the latter because well……they’re snapshots. After 2 or 3 pages of reading about Marie Bonaparte taking up psychoanalysis and an incident where:
“a man did flash her, she would walk up to him, give him her card, and say, 'Put that away, I’m not interested! But please come and see me tomorrow, I would like to talk to you' .”
You can’t help but want to know more!
Or Frida Kahlo apparently being in the habit of referring to Parisian artists as ‘bitches’ or in reference to her relationship with Diego Rivera
“I have suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar ran me over, the other accident was Diego Rivera”.
Part of the charm of this book is in it’s humor and it’s unique way of choosing who to chronicle and how. As the author points out in the introduction, the list if the deceased is quite daunting. With this in mind, each chapter is given a theme with 4-5 people being profiled. Themes range from sex addiction (Casanova, Talullah Bankhead), to famous monkey owners (Catherine De Medici), to famous frauds among others. I learned a lot here and much like the relentlessly positive Ben Franklin, had a good time doing it.
“a man did flash her, she would walk up to him, give him her card, and say, 'Put that away, I’m not interested! But please come and see me tomorrow, I would like to talk to you' .”
You can’t help but want to know more!
Or Frida Kahlo apparently being in the habit of referring to Parisian artists as ‘bitches’ or in reference to her relationship with Diego Rivera
“I have suffered two grave accidents in my life. One in which a streetcar ran me over, the other accident was Diego Rivera”.
Part of the charm of this book is in it’s humor and it’s unique way of choosing who to chronicle and how. As the author points out in the introduction, the list if the deceased is quite daunting. With this in mind, each chapter is given a theme with 4-5 people being profiled. Themes range from sex addiction (Casanova, Talullah Bankhead), to famous monkey owners (Catherine De Medici), to famous frauds among others. I learned a lot here and much like the relentlessly positive Ben Franklin, had a good time doing it.
September 6, 2018
A remarkable book about dead people! This book contains biographies of famous people who have left 'interesting' and often noteworthy legacies. The categorisation of the content is neither by alphabetical order nor by historical era but by themes, for example - `There's Nothing Like a Bad Start in Life', `Driven', and `Is That All There Is?' All the big names are included, such as Marx, de Vinci, Freud, Genghis Khan, H.G. Wells, Cromwell, Bentham, and Henry Ford. Others are just as intriguing, John Dee, St. Cuthbert, Emma, Lady Hamilton, Tesla, Moll Cutpurse, and Count Cagliostro, and more besides. The authors have chosen to highlight the unusual and extraordinary stories for their subjects; this makes for absorbing and entertaining reading. My only criticism of the book is that almost all of the `famous' people discussed come from the UK, Europe and the USA; perhaps these regions are the key market for the book. If you seek a very readable book to occasionally dip into and reflect upon famous and infamous people from the past - and learn some astonishing stories too - this book will not disappoint you.
March 20, 2023
It was interesting to note the random details that stick out and remain as one's legacy as time passes. There were also lots of virgins - could be coincidental, could be that it stuck out as a characteristic each time since it's not usually mentioned, or it could be there were more people that die virgins than I realized in the past (or even currently).
Although there were pockets of interesting people and/or categories, the book was overall more of a miss than a hit for me. It felt dense and there were so many people mentioned I don't walk away feeling like I've learned much about anything. This could be a good research tool though - I would recommend taking on shorter sections and/or pausing between people to reorient yourself (there aren't really built-in pauses so make your own).
Find all my reviews at: https://readingatrandom.blogspot.com
Although there were pockets of interesting people and/or categories, the book was overall more of a miss than a hit for me. It felt dense and there were so many people mentioned I don't walk away feeling like I've learned much about anything. This could be a good research tool though - I would recommend taking on shorter sections and/or pausing between people to reorient yourself (there aren't really built-in pauses so make your own).
Find all my reviews at: https://readingatrandom.blogspot.com
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