The Browser's Book of Endings: The End of Practically Everything and Everybody

by Charles Panati

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 014028690X
• ISBN13: 9780140286908
• Release Date: December 1999
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 470 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Great Read

A wonderful source for learning something new with each search!

A decade later, a great book of 'endings' is revived

It is truly wonderful to see Charles Panati's work back in print. There was a decade-long spell where all of his lively, meticulous and engrossing work was unavailable. This collection is his best, and is finally back in print. I'm already mailing copies to my friends. The sheer variety and scope of this (long but never dull) book is a brilliant display. It's not just the 'last words' of celebrities, war heros, presidents and kings. Or the sobering list of incredible but extinct creatures - the Steller Sea Cow, the Passenger Pigeon, the comical/doomed Dodo, the 7-foot New Zealand Moa bird - it's all here. Even abandoned burial practices (Zoroastrians leaving corpses on 15-foot platforms to be exposed to the elements/birds, or the French placing millions of skeletons in the catacombs of Paris). But there's so much more - catastrophic yet now forgotten plagues, U.S. Presidential wills (what DID Abe Lincoln leave behind?...), and fascinating stories of bizarre and ineffective medical practices that have passed into history, curing no one. If you've read this far, you want this book. I want you to have it too. Buy it, it's great.

interesting

it's an interesting book filled with little known details about death and other endings. i was at a loss as to what rating to give the book. he wasted time on the extinctions, though he picked the largest extinctions, they are also some of the dullest. Too many pages were spent on wills and other mundane thing. but, when he discussed the deaths and last words of famous people throughout history, the book really picked up. but i can see how much research he put into the book, so i gave him four stars instead of three.

Endings Can Be Fun

The Browser's Book of Endings (by Charles Panati) proves that endings can be fun, if done correctly. This book is filled with much fun facts on death, disease and extinctions (among other gloomy subjects) yet it is completely and morbidly fascinating. I will even confess to not browsing through it as strongly recommended by the title but instead launching myself into it and reading it from cover to cover. It brought me back to my heady childhood days glued to such founts of wisdom as the Book of Lists and the People's Almanac. The humour in the book was also a delighful suprise (and a much needed release from all of the doom and gloom). A fun time was had by all.

this book has everything for the eternal pessimist.

You want death,doom and massive body counts? Then this book is for you. Where else can you learn about how many people died of the black plauge, thyphoid Mary and all the glorious comunnicable contagens? It's all here. Too bad it's out of print.

One of the most oft-referred-to in my library.

This is one of the most amazing books in my library. It's a little macabre -- part one, "Last Things First", starts with the chapter on Death. But the descriptions of the last hours of many noteworthy people are worth the price of the book alone, and that's only a small part of the book. My only complaint is that it's a little too thorough where American presidents are concerned -- this bit drags, in stark contrast to everything else in the book. I am disappointed to see that it's out of print.