Unglamorous 'Death' details celeb suicides

Obituaries make interesting reading. That's when the best stories come out, scathingly and fondly told, all the interesting episodes and escapades, but the scandals, too, and the achievements. An obituary is a picture of the life. But this is an unhappy book. The famous lives in it are just a prologue to the famous deaths. Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, Hunter S. Thompson, Diane Arbus, Vincent Van Gogh, Mark Rothko, Spalding Gray, Abbie Hoffman, Kurt Cobain, Adolf Hitler and a few others all died by their own hand. In each case, the last hours are described (the manner of death is reported in such detail that it sometimes reads like an instruction in the art); the earlier suicide attempts are cataloged; the psychological histories are gone over; the suicide note and last words copied out. The last thing Hunter S. Thompson typed on his typewriter was the single word "counselor." What did it mean? What does any of it mean? Suicide is always mystifying, but seldom a complete surprise.

The author's approach is thorough, almost forensic, but occasionally flippant. The people were glamorous but their deaths, in this kind of detail, are unromantic and unenviable. "Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous, and the Notorious" is an impressive accumulation of facts, but it isn't a good read. People are likely to open the book with morbid curiosity and close it with a sense that celebrities are as unhappy and fragile as everybody else.