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    How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous
    How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous
    How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous
    Audiobook3 hours

    How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous

    Written by Georgia Bragg

    Narrated by L. J. Ganser

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Best-selling author Georgia Bragg delights young people with her quirky characters and unique subject matter. How They Croaked provides all the gory details of the awful ends of 19 awfully famous people. It details Ludwig Van Beethoven's expansive finale, Henry VII's explosive end, Albert Einstein's great brain escape, and Marie Curie's glowing demise. "This . study deserves the wild popularity it will without doubt acquire." -Booklist, starred review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJul 29, 2011
    ISBN9781461849889
    How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous
    Author

    Georgia Bragg

    GEORGIA BRAGG is the author of How They Croaked as well as Matisse on the Loose, a middle-grade novel. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and two cats. www.georgiabragg.com

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    Reviews for How They Croaked

    4.5/5

    15 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This book was so much fun! It's simultaneously breezy and gross, and I think it will be embraced with glee by young teens. There's plenty of fabulously arcane information mixed in with the obligatory exploding corpses, blistering plasters, lead poisoning and leeches. Covers lots of famous deaders, from Cleopatra to Marie Curie, from Caesar to President Garfield. Recommended!
    • 4/5
      In this supposedly "ghoulish" compendium of how famous (and infamous) people throughout the ages have died, the authors discuss, in sometimes vivid detail, the manner(s) through which they have died. I actually found myself wishing they would have gotten even more visceral with the descriptions! While interesting, it could have gone into more depth, but the book was definitely entertaining.
    • 4/5
      In this semi-ghoulish book, Georgia Bragg puts together a compendium of famous deaths. Many of the people she discusses -- Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, King Tut, Charles Dickens, Marie Curie, President James A. Garfield, Napoleon, Edgar Allan Poe, Pocahantas, Elizabeth I, Henry VIII, Galileo, Mozart, Beethoven, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and more -- are well known for what they did while alive. Less is known about how they met their ends.Bragg provides a lot of extra information about these larger than life people along with how they died. For example, Charles Dickens was bi-polar and suffered mini-strokes that eventually led to his death. And Galileo suffered from gout, which was likely brought about from all of the lead-laced wine that he drank in place of water, which was thought to be unsafe at the time. He eventually died from lead poisoning. It's interesting to learn about how such well-known, productive people met their demise -- and as she writes in the final paragraph, "There is one thing to learn from each of their stories: whether your dream is to study worms or live in a space station ... it's up to you. Whatever your story is, if what you are doing is so much fun it feels like you're just playing, you are onto something very important. When you feel that way, you are doing what you're meant to do. Don't let anyone talk you out of it. Because guess what? Eventually, everybody's story ends."
    • 3/5
      Details on the deaths and final dispositions of some of the most famous historical figures. Features last words, gore and humor.
    • 4/5
      King Tut likely died of malaria; Edgar Allan Poe is suspected to have had rabies. Beethoven and Galileo both met their ends due to lead poisoning. Fifteen other historical figures--world leaders, writers, scientists, and more--were felled by things as mundane as pneumonia and as unpredictable as angry mobs, and this book identifies which gruesome end each person came to.

      The title alone will make this the easiest booktalk ever.
    • 4/5
      I think, as a kid, I would have gobbled this book up. The adult in me wants more information about the lives of all the people included. Luckily for me, there is a section at the end with more information.
    • 4/5
      Very interesting book about some of the more famous (and at least one not-so-famous) people from history, and the ways they died. Often, bad medical beliefs of the time contributed, as in the ugly, long-drawn-out death of former President James A. Garfield.Often gruesome, yet also funny, this would be a fun read for the 5th-8th grade crowd, and includes an extensive bibliography, index and suggested further reading of books and websites.Highly recommended!
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book (listened to the audio version). It's a fun, interesting, and easy read.
    • 5/5
      I like it. it's fun and i like it. ###