September 12, 2004
Cool Dead People: Obituaries of Real Folks We Wish We'd Met a Little Sooner by Jane O'Boyle

Cool Dead People: Obituaries of Real Folks We Wish We’d Met a Little Sooner by Jane O'Boyle: a quick little book that tells the tales of people that have passed on.

Jane O'Boyle collected obituaries of over one hundred interesting people (categorized into trailblazers, curators, problem solvers, advocates, and dreamers) and put them in this small book so that we could all learn more about them. While some of the people in here may be known to many, most of them are people that I’d never heard of, doing things I’d never known about. As she put it, “they are everyday people like you and me who did extraordinary things. And that makes them cool.”

As a poker player, I was particularly happy to find the obituary of Stuey Ungar, one of the greatest poker players ever that died at the young age of forty-five. While an incredible card player, he was also a hopeless gambler and addict and even lost $1,000,000 on one football game once.

At a mere 143 pages with larger than average type and smaller than average pages, the book takes hardly any time at all to read, but it’s still pretty darn interesting.