I just received an email regarding the new book by Alix Strauss entitled Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous and the Notorious, published September 2009, by Harper Collins. Death Becomes Them is available in paperback and e-book for $14.99.The following post is excerpted from the press release for the book.
The weather in Sussex, London is brisk; the sun shining. The large stones are smooth in her hands. Solid and heavy in her pockets. They bulge from her coat. Though she found herself in this exact position, standing by the river, ready to end her life days ago, she failed. She returned home drenched, body shivering from the cold. But today she knows more. Today she has the rocks.
Virginia Woolf spent most of her life in one of two states: writing or fighting a bipolar/manic depressiveness which went undiagnosed until after she’d drowned herself on March 28th, 1941. Three weeks later her body was discovered by a group of children playing near the water.
Each of the 20 legendary luminaries unearthed in Alix Strauss’ Death Becomes Them was brilliant, creative and of course, suicidal. Manic, bipolar, depressed and suffering from addiction, these geniuses were also self-destructive.
Death Becomes Them is an eye-opening and intimate portrait of the lonely, sad and nightmarish lives these famous folks led. Along with being an historic overview of suicide, Strauss’ book delves into the deaths of our most influential cultural icons: Sylvia Plath, Adolf Hitler, Diane Arbus, Sigmund Freud, Vincent van Gogh, Abbie Hoffman, Virginia Woolf, Kurt Cobain, Spalding Gray, and Anne Sexton, among others. The deaths are as diverse as the person that killed themselves. Some are tragic -- Dorothy Dandridge was found naked on her bathroom floor, a handful of anti-depressants swimming in her system. Others are bizarre -- Hunter S. Thompson shot himself while on the phone with his wife in an eerie, copycat tribute to his hero, Ernest Hemingway who killed himself in a similar way forty-four years earlier.
While Strauss explores some of the most talked about and monumental suicides of the past she examines our own morbid fascination, asking why we have become so fixated on these tortured souls. While paying tribute to their lives, focus is placed on their final days and the incidents that led up to the moment when they took their last breath. Strauss decodes their suicide notes, touches on their accomplishments and delves into the methodology of their deaths by documented autopsy and police reports, death certificates, obituaries, and personal photos. Lists regarding controversial, bizarre, famous and poorly executed suicides along with unusual facts and statistics are found in this mammoth tome.
Written in a creative, descriptive and informative tone, Death Becomes Them is a private, provocative and personal tribute to these lost souls—a fond remembrance and a final goodbye.
Alix Strauss: A media savvy social satirist, Alix has been a featured lifestyle and trend writer on national morning and talk shows including: ABC, CBS, CNN and, most recently, The Today Show. Her articles cover a range of topics, from beauty, travel, and food trends to celebrity interviews, which have appeared in the New York Times, New York Post, and Daily News, as well as national magazines: Time magazine, Marie Claire, Entertainment Weekly, Self, Esquire, and Departures, among others. Her collection of shorts, The Joy of Funerals, was published by St. Martin’s Press. Her latest book is an anthology of mother coordinated blind date horror stories called Have I Got a Guy For You. Alix lives in New York City.
For more reviews and information, or to watch Alix’s TV appearances, learn more about her upcoming projects, recent articles and events, please go to her web site: http://www.alixstrauss.com/