How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous

by Georgia Bragg

This book is exactly what it sounds like it is--the stories of the deaths of famous people. The author recounts the morbid, weird, controversial, and fascinating deaths of 19 people, from King Tut to Albert Einstein. Warning: some of the things doctors used to do in the name of trying to cure people were pretty disgusting, and here those things are described in great detail. While the author does list an extensive bibliography, from which she researched, her qualifications as a historian are never listed, and a factual mistake in the Henry VIII chapter further places this book strictly in the entertainment category. A fun, interesting read, if you take it with a grain of salt.