I freely admit that I often judge a book by its cover, or by the title. And you'll have to admit that this one is catchy on both counts. With The Last Days of Dead Celebrities, author Mitchell Fink has brought together about as unlikely a grouping of celebrities as one could imagine. About the only things they have in common is that they were celebrities and they are now dead - hence the title.
Some of them, such as tennis great Arthur Ashe, knew for months that death was imminent. Thus the story becomes a biography of how he handled the delicate process of notifying his fans when he'd rather have kept his AIDS private. (He was infected with HIV through a possibly unnecessary blood transfusion before blood banks knew enough to screen for the virus.)
Others, like John Lennon, died very unexpectedly - in his case at the hands of an assassin. Then the story reads more like a murder mystery where each little action prior to the murder asks the question "what if this hadn't happened this way?"
There's no particular moral or message from the book. If anything it is that each of us will die in our own way on a timetable that we seldom control. Even the suicides (of which celebrities are certainly not exempt) seem to be the result of forces just a little beyond the individual's ability to cope.
This is not a happy book.
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