A Little Light Obituary Reading

Amazing! An author with my perspective on obituaries has written a book! I love the anecdotes that would never come to light without the final elegy on the obits page - it also takes a special writer to write such observations with finesse and respect.

• Like the Army nurse Grace G. Orr, who helped liberate the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, Austria. She was never promoted because she refused a direct order to take the hair ribbons out of her hair - the joy of seeing the delight her young wartime patients took in them, exceeded her desire for higher rank. To her, making patients feel a little better was more important than wearing captain's bars.
• Or my favorite, August T. Stern a man with the Army's 6th Ranger Battalion who helped rescue 511 POWs from a Japanese war camp-- many of them survivors of the Bataan Death March. It was virtually a suicide mission to volunteer to extricate those men from Cabanatuan Camp in Luson, which was armed by 3000 Japanese regulars. Most of the emaciated POWs had to be carried out on the backs of their rescuers. Stern was carrying a man, Hugh Kennedy, who turned out to be a Roman Catholic priest when he began to cross what he thought was a shallow stream, and realized too late that he had stepped into a sewage ditch instead. He cussed before he could stop himself. He apologized for using the Lord's name in vain, and priest absolved him by saying - " Son you are forgiven because there is a time and place for everything, and this is the time, and this is certainly the place!"

The book, which I saw reviewed today is : The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries by Marilyn Johnson. She notes "We're living in the Golden Age of the Obituary, when the craft of obit-writing has reached its apex." Americans tend to reveal the extra-ordinary in the ordinary person, like the two entries I've cited above, while the British, Johnson notes, delight in producing vivid, historically rich, gossipy and sometimes downright nasty obits about the famous or high-born. Example: From the London Daily Telegraph: Jeaneet Schmid, 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 Cairo.

Anyone read any good obits lately? What would yours say?