The QI Book of the Dead

by JohnLloyd&JohnMitchinson (Author), John Lloyd (Author), John Mitchinson (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $3.25

  Welcome to QI: The Book of the Dead, a biographical dictionary with a twist - one where only the most interesting people made it in! QI have got together six dozen of the happiest, saddest, maddest and most successful men and women from history. It celebrates their wisdom, learn from their mistakes and marvel at their bad taste in clothes. Hans Christian Anderson was terrified of naked women, Florence Nightingale spent her last fifty years in bed, Sigmund Freud smoked twenty cigars a day, Catherine de Medici applied a daily face mask made of pigeon dung, Rembrandt van Rijn died penniless and Madame Mao banned cicadas, rustling noises and pianos. Carefully collected and ordered by the QI team into themed chapters with thought-provoking titles such as 'There's Nothing Like a Bad Start in Life', 'Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone'. Each chapter reveals hilarious insights into the true nature of the most interesting people who ever lived, including Isaac Newton, Genghis Khan, Sigmund Freud, Florence Nightingale and Karl Marx. From the bestselling authors of The Book of General Ignorance and 1,277 Facts to Knock Your Socks Off, comes a fun and inspirational biographical dictionary, with motivational stories about the famous and the obscure.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2009

  $3.25

  ' The QI Book of the Dead is a book about life. What an awful thing life is. It's like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless' - Gustave Flaubert. Around 90 billion people have existed since the human race began. From this huge number, the bestselling QI team selected 600 of the finest examples of our species and researched them in depth, distilling this immense banquet of life into an exquisite tasting menu of six-dozen crisp, racy mini-biographies, where the internationally and immortally famous rub shoulders with the undeservedly and (until now) permanently obscure. The object is to learn something about what it means to be alive and how we can make the most of the time we have. The QI Book of the Dead compares and contrasts the different ways individual human beings cope (or fail to cope) with the curves that the uncaring universe throws at us. Collected into themed chapters with thought-provoking titles such as 'There's Nothing Like a Bad Start in Life', 'Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone' and 'Is That All There Is?' here is a chance to share the secrets of the Dead, to celebrate their wisdom, to learn from their mistakes, and to marvel at their bad taste in clothes. The man who is not dead still has a chance. Lebanese Proverb. We don't rule out the alternative possibility of a compassionate God whose motives are beyond our ken.