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Ebook About “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” –William Saroyan, Pulitzer Prize–winning authorFamous authors, like everybody else, know that one day they will die. Final Chapters tells the fascinating stories of more than one hundred writers’ encounters with death—and their attitudes toward the Grim Reaper: fear, uncertainty, or acceptance.Francis Bacon wrote, “It is as natural to die as to be born,” while Socrates told the judges who condemned him, “And now we go our ways, I to die and you to live. Which is better is known to God alone.”Death often came in startling ways for these well-known writers. The playwright Aeschylus was conked by a turtle falling from the sky. Christopher Marlowe was stabbed in a barroom brawl. Molière collapsed while playing the role of a hypochondriac in one of his plays.Edgar Allan Poe was found semicomatose in someone else’s clothes shortly before he died. Sherwood Anderson was felled by a toothpick in a martini. Did Dylan Thomas really die of eighteen straight whiskeys? And was it a bottle cap or murder that did in Tennessee Williams?If these authors have lessons for us, the best may be that of Marcus Aurelius: “Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back.”Book Final Chapters: How Famous Authors Died Review :
Why would any author be interested in writing a book about death and dying of famous writers? What could be so inviting about such a book? After all, the various ways of dying seem to be somewhat limited. It has been said that the biggest killer of humans is old age. The other causes are hardly more exciting: heart attacks, strokes, cancer, infectious diseases, tuberculosis and few less important others. Perhaps it is not the actual, immediate cause but rather the nature of death itself that is intriguing. Two characteristics might be behind this intrigue: the inevitability and unaccountability of death. Of the 107 billion people born on this planet ( including the present 7) not one escaped death. And not one was able to define the exact date of departure ( with rare exceptions).To go through the approximately 100 cases in this book can be taxing, if not confusing. And, along the way the reader can't help wondering: if these are famous persons why is the author focusing on their deaths? Would it not be more rewarding and interesting to focus on their achievements and personal talents?But, the brief accounts given in the book about each person serve as reminders of old anecdotes. For example, we are reminded of Socrates (469 BC) who was charged with impiety and corruption of the minds of people, and sentenced to death by taking a poison. Unfazed. he calmly took the poison urging his friends not to cry or worry since there is no proof that this life is better than the afterlife. Or, take the story of Sir Walter Raleigh (1618) who disobeyed the King's orders and was sent to the gallows for beheading. He calmly checked the axe and finding it sharp enough turned to the executioner and said "Strike,man. strike! This is as good as medicine". These two cases and few others from the days of Plato and Aristotle point to one advantage seen in death, especially in early days, namely as a means to leave behind this life of trouble and misery.If there is any comfort to be found in this amusing but cheerless book is the discovery of how fortunate we are in our present lives. The sickness and misery that people endured up to almost a century ago was overwhelming. Without a semblance of our modern day medical care, hardly any household escaped some serious sickness or death in its family. Those affected most were the innocent, helpless little children. It was not unusual for a family with ten children to lose five before the age ten. The Brontes family, five daughters and one son, with three gifted writers ( who wrote,Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights..) were all wiped out by tuberculosis! One wonders: How did those families cope with such overwhelming disasters?!As we celebrate the comforts of this life (and always ask for more) it is perhaps wise to reflect back on how we got here, and why so many in the past welcomed death as a means of relief from the pain and misery of the lives they lived.Fuad R QubeinJuly, 2016 And Another Thing…In the long runBy Dr J L Yahya RobertsUltimately mortality is one hundred percent. Or as John Maynard Keynes wrote, ‘in the long turn we are all dead.’But what of death? Having published, with his wife, Virginia, a range of sage and practical advice on preparing for death, in ‘Life is not a dress rehearsal’, Jim Bernhard now produces (Skyhorse Publications) a confection of the final hours of celebrated writers, in ‘Final Chapters: how famous authors died’.It is a racy tour de force imbued as ever with Bernhard’s engaging wit and humour. His collection of some hundred writers spans over 2,500 years, from the blood curdling Athenian playwright, Aeschylus of 525 BC, to the USA film critic and blogger Roger Elbert who died in 2013. In his introduction Bernhard finds that the ancients he includes lived longer than the moderns, though at a ripe age himself he is clearly aiming to correct the balance.Amongst the youngest writer to meet his end probably from TB was John Keats, at 25 the English poet. Then comes the poet Byron, who caught fever after riding in the rain in Greece, and died at age 36. Another youngster, the Welshman poet Dylan Thomas collapsed at 39 and brazenly attributed it to 18 whiskies in one last drunken session in New York.Lest we are trapped to believing all good poets die young, Bernhard feeds us stories of the last rites of many an aged scribbler. He starts with Aeschylus who died by accident, somewhat akin to the eternally embarrassed Jerome in a Graham Greene short story, A Shocking Accident, whose father died when a pig fell on him from a balcony in Italy. Aeschylus, in his seventieth year, never recovered from the effects of a turtle dropped on his head from a great height by an eagle in the Sicilian countryside.Bernhard shows that his selected authors have views on the grim reaper that range from fear, acceptance, indifference, resistance and assistance. For there are, amongst his clutch of writers, suicides, such as Hemingway, the American writer and bon viveur, Sylvia Plath the American poet, and Virginia Woolf, the British novelist; the victims of assassination, include de Lorka the Spanish poet, and the British playwright Joe Orton, killed by his lover; the sufferers of execution, include the Greek philosopher, Socrates, sentenced to death for impiety.But such drama is balanced by the many of his subjects who lived long and gently passed away through natural causes, as did the British novelist Graham Greene at 86 years, Arthur Miller, the American dramatist aged 89 years, and Leo Tolstoy the Russian novelist aged 82 years.Whilst this is more than a book principally about how and when people died, it does in places veer into potted biography, to fill out the tale, for which many may well be glad. As with all lists of the past greats however there are gaps. Bernhard could have provided more colour in his dramatis personae had he included Nobel Laureates such as Rabindrath Tagore the poet and novelist from India, Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist, and VS Naipaul the novelist and travel writer from Trinidad.We all, I suppose, have our favourites. Missing for me in Bernhard’s great writers are from ancient times, the Chinese philosopher Confucius; from his middle ages section, the Persian poet Muhammad Rumi; from the Renaissance, the dramatist John Webster; from the Enlightenment, the novelist Daniel Defoe; from the Romantic era, Honoré de Balzac; from the Victorian era, who else but Queen Victoria, whose Highland Journal sold 20,000 copies in its first edition and who was reputably addressed by Disraeli, statesman and novelist as ‘we authors, Ma’am’; and finally I missed in the modern era, Boris Pasternak, J M Barrie and E M Forster. But then this is the very stuff for a well filled sequel, which I do hope will follow.The final jottings, wills and last words Bernhard narrates, with due sensitivity plus a certain whimsical charm, for these are at the heart of this accomplished 300 page tome. We are reminded that Shakespeare in his will left to his estranged wife his second-best bed. We discover Roald Dahl, the modern darkly humorous story teller, writing shortly before his demise:‘Feeling sleepy…without that old bubbly energy that drives one to write books and drink gin and chase girls.’And Bernhard reveals much more behind the funeral curtains of those whose writings are so widely cherished. 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