Exploring the dead zone

    On Oct. 25, 1986, the New York Times ran side-by-side obituaries for the scientist who discovered vitamin C and the scientist who isolated vitamin K. One was 93 years old, and the other was 92.

"One died on a Wednesday, one on a Thursday," Marilyn Johnson writes in her introduction to "The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasure of Obituaries." "One's farewell ran three columns, one ran two. One extracted the vitamin from tons of cattle adrenals scooped from the Chicago slaughterhouses, and also from paprika. One extracted female hormones from tons of sow ovaries. Make something of these differences if you dare. Albert Szent-Gyorghi and Edward Adelbert Doisy Sr., Dr. C and Dr. K respectively, both Nobel Prize winners, left the world together."

With that anecdote, Johnson plunges readers into the world of obituary collectors and writers — a world that proves surprisingly entertaining, despite its potentially depressing subject.

She introduces us to obituary writers and collectors, explains the difference between "London-style" obits and American-style news obits and provides excerpts from obits that have stuck in her memory. (One memorable example from The Daily Telegraph: "Jeanette Schmidt, the professional whistler who has died in Vienna aged 80, performed with Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf and Marlene Dietrich; she had been born a man and had fought in Hitler's Wehrmacht before undergoing a sex change in a Cairo clinic.") Her work makes for a fast-paced, thoroughly enjoyable read with far more resonance than you might expect.

Johnson reminds newspaper reporters and readers that a thoroughly reported, well-written obituary is more than a community service — it's a celebration of what made that person unique and a reminder of our common humanity. Beyond that, it's a way of defying fate.

"The better the obit, the closer it approaches re-creation," she  writes. "It's an act of reverence, a contemplation of this life that sparked and died, but also an act of defiance, a fist waved at God or the stars. And what else, really, do we have besides the story?"