The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries (P.S.)
By:
Marilyn Johnson
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Description:
Marilyn Johnson was enthralled by the remarkable lives that were marching out of this world—so she sought out the best obits in the English language and the people who spent their lives writing about the dead. She surveyed the darkest corners of Internet chat rooms, and made a pilgrimage to London to savor the most caustic and literate obits of all. Now she leads us on a compelling journey into the cult and culture behind the obituary page and the unusual lives we don't quite appreciate until they're gone.
Description:
Once upon a time, journalism profs duly instructed their greenhorn grads to seek out community papers and the obit pages as logical entrance points into the world of newspaper reporting. Working for cash-strapped local papers allowed novices to practice writing everything from hard news to lifestyle features. Obituaries, meanwhile, were a rung on the ladder of major publications, albeit the lowest. The musty, dusty obit pages also traditionally hosted aging reporters put out to pasture. Not any more, argues Marilyn Johnson in her unabashedly knock-kneed love letter to the obit pages, The Dead Beat. Today, august publications like The New York Times, England's Daily Telegraph, Independent, and The Economist, and Canada's Globe and Mail use exalted members of the fourth estate to turn out smart, hip tributes to widespread, almost cultish, acclaim. Why? Because, as Johnson persuasively demonstrates in her book, truth is almost always stranger than fiction and a well-written, deeply researched obit is not only a vital historical record but a damn fine read over coffee and toast. "God is my assignment editor," cracks Richard Pearson of the Washington Post and if that isn't more interesting than what's going on in your city council chambers, author Johnson and those working the so-called Dead Beat don't know what is. As Johnson explains in free-wheeling prose, today's obit writers are virtual folk heroes with global Internet followings and their own conventions. With care and an ear for gentle humor, Johnson guides her readers through the surprisingly structured, labyrinthine obit scene, pausing to meet the writers while pondering both the essence of our being and why, in the right hands, the life of an average Joe can be just as riveting as the shenanigans of a high-flying playboy. And infinitely more resonant. Savvy J-school professors and their students are advised to take heed. --Kim Hughes
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Release Date: 2007-01-30
Customer Review: 1 out of 5
"Ain't goin' nowhere!" - I kept waiting for the main point of the book but never found it. There were some interesting historical portions but for the most part this book just did not keep me interested and wanting to read more. It seemed very repetitive, like it was going nowhere.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Fun, quirky and informative... - After reading and thoroughly enjoying Marilyn Johnson's This Book is Overdue, I just had to read The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries. What a fun, quirky and informative book!
Before reading The Dead Beat, I didn't realize that the reading of obituaries has become such a cult. Johnson calls obituary readers "members of the Church of Obituaries" and compares them to heroin addicts. "Like poetry, obituaries have had their flower period and their bleak period and their modern period." But I was surprised to discover that "we are living in the Golden Age of the Obituary...Our own glorious era has been a time of expansion, innovation, entertainment, and world-class one-upmanship. In one generation, a boring, moldy old form has sprung to life." I was especially pleased to discover that a local newspaper, The Philadelphia Daily News, led the charge with obituary writers Jim Nicholson and Leon Taylor.
Johnson tells us everything we always wanted to know about obituaries, and then some. She talks to writers and editors, she attends the Annual Great Obituary Writers' International Conference, she belongs to internet sites, takes part in internet forums, and she reads obituaries from all over the globe. She gives examples of her favorite obits that run the gamut from moving and poignant to funny and irreverent. She also tells us how obituaries have become more personalized and how newspapers no longer reserve obituaries for just the rich and famous.
After reading both of Marilyn Johnson's books (and also hearing her speak recently at the Free Library of Philadelphia), she has become one of my favorite non-fiction writers. So she better start writing a third book real soon or her fans will be disappointed!
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
You gotta laugh, c'mon, now! Or cry, occasionally - The "dead zone" is one of those things, like April Fool's Day stories, that British newspapers generally do better than American ones, at least when it comes to the rich and famous dead.
The Brits, in both cases, have a sense of snark that is considered "not proper" for about any American seven-day or six-day daily, basically.
That said, American papers have done quite well with the "storytelling" format of "everyman" obits.
Marilyn Johnson covers both types, and more details about modern obit writing, quite well in this book.
Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Dead on! - I am disappointed that my local paper's obituaries have none of the flair or wit of the obituaries celebrated in this little book. It's great to know that this long-time ghetto of the journalistic world is getting its due.
Ms. Johnson's writing is delightful -- breezy but not cynical, earnest but not plodding. I particularly enjoyed the interviews with her fellow obit writers. If one were so inclined, this would be a good book to use as a guide to creative obit writing.
My only caveat would be that you can't read this book and image how these writers would treat your friends and relatives. In many cases that she chronicles -- especially the irreverent, and even snarky, obits of the British tabloids -- I would be really unhappy to see people I loved treated in this way. Not to mention, I'm thinking I should get started on my own obit before somebody else takes the initiative!
If you're not a newspaper fanatic, and definitely if you're not an avid obit reader, this book may not hold your interest to the end. Skimming it should suffice. After all, life is short.
Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Celebrating Life! - Obituary writers, like those who toil at the IRS audit department or in the city sewers, are accustomed to the inevitable widening eyes, visible shudders and morbid remarks triggered by their reply to the question: "What do you do for a living?"
Marilyn Johnson's The Dead Beat tells quite a different story. An avid reader will instantly know she's in the throes of an accomplished author, gripped by an original perspective that captures the imagination and delights the soul. Johnson declares that an "obit" writer dwells in a world of humour, poignancy, marvellousness, perverseness, and pleasure. It's a world celebrating life, and what can be more glorious than that!
Ever since the Obituary Revolution in the 80s turned "the obit page from a holding pen for broken-down journalists" into a fascinating vocation akin to detective work scouring for the key that is the secret of a life just passed, waking up tense every day to wonder if her subject has died yet, the charged life of an obit writer is getting better all the time. And with an aging population about to set fire to the funeral business, it's never been a better time to celebrate.
Johnson's style is energetic, imaginative and personably engaging: "One of the great things about this vocation is its expandability...(it) can take you to heroin level in no time" she writes, extending an invitation to walk up ninth avenue in New York to meet the editor of obituaries from the New York Times. The interview is one of many in the United States and Britain, and extends memorably to Jim Nicolson, the "father of all obit writers" who set the standard in the Philadelphia Daily News in 1982 for writing about the ordinary man. "Nicholson plucked people out of the sea of agate type and wrote full-blown feature-style obituaries about them: a janitor, a grandma known for her love of poker, `a world-class scammer.'" Budding obit journalists were tutored into the profession by his obit kit.
Johnson's book offers more than a tour of editors and writers. She covers the annual gathering of writers are the Sixth Great Obituary Writers' International Conference, attendance at the celebrity memorial service for Arthur Miller, and offers a grand chapter on how 9/11 created the Portrait Page.There's her not-so-favourable opinion of tributes, a literary set piece of which she says life has been written out. There's marvellous descriptions of the British obituary scene where in London, obits dominate in quality and quantity, generous with understatement and use of The Code (euphemisms such as "passed on").
And lastly, an introduction to alt.obituaries, a Google group considered Grand Central where obituaries are posted and discussed. "The good ones are as intoxicating as a lung full of snowy air."
Johnson's focus on life touches a nerve. It's true: "obituaries have a pull, a natural gravity, for those of us who've observed that life has a way of ending."
This is a grand book that opens the door for explorations into the challenges facing the obituary industry: how to increase visibility for women and Negroes (who oddly enough, don't seem to die very often), of a declining traditional newspaper readership, difficult economic times and modern technology that facilitates all forms of dying such as Art Buchwald's online video.
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