DEAD: A Celebration of Mortality

by Charles Saatchi

In this new book, cleverly designed to look like a marble tombstone (complete with marble edge-stain), Charles Saatchi relates often perversely entertaining stories that look at death and mortality in a coolly amused and detached way. In 52 brief essays—sometimes dark, sometimes droll—and including 50 illustrations, Saatchi spans a wide variety of topics; the Russian mafia, snake-eating spiders, Attila the Hun, the Wild West, being run over by your own dog, even laughing yourself into a heart attack.

Genres: Nonfiction

248 pages, Hardcover

First published September 22, 2015

About the author

Charles Saatchi (/ˈsɑːtʃiː/; born 9 June 1943) is an Iraqi-British-Jewish businessman and the co-founder with his brother Maurice of the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. The brothers led that business – the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s – until they were forced out in 1995. In the same year, the Saatchi brothers formed a new agency called M&C Saatchi. Charles is also known as an art collector and the owner of the Saatchi Gallery, and in particular for his sponsorship of the Young British Artists (YBAs), including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.(wikipedia)

Reviews

[Marc Nash · Rating 2 out of 5]

As befits a man with an advertising background this is all surface sheen and no depth. Some good ideas and interesting facts here, but few merit more than a couple of lines. Most chapters begin with a nugget relevant to the title then off he flits to something rather unrelated as if he can't sustain his own interest or his own research abilities. It does look beautiful, but then a book as a gravestone about death, hardly bathroom reading or coffee table adornment.

[Ekaterina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Awful formatting, grammar mistakes galore, cheesy stories. Was it self-published? Probably.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review Title: Dead to writes

I pick up and read books for many reasons, but this may be the first book I ever read based on the photograph in an advertisement sign. Last year when I was in London I rode the Underground almost every day, and one stop had an ad for this book with a picture that made me stop, think, and smile. It was a black and white photo, possibly from the early 20th century, of a young boy, about 12 years old I'd guess, leapfrogging over a gravestone. What a powerful symbol of death inexorably waiting to claim us, but of the youthful and very human (I might even say divine) desire to defeat death by leapfrogging over it! Death is the ultimate end, but we can live like it doesn't matter until it comes.

While the actual book may not have lived up to the promise of that one photograph (which is appropriately the last one in the book) it is still an interesting piece of work. Charles Saatchi is in fact an advertising executive and design guru better known for his art and cultural exhibitions in London. Dead is in essence one of those exhibitions in the form of words arranged in short essays accompanied by photographs in a portable book format. The topics vary widely, but all center on death.

One of Saatchi's achievements in Dead is to show how broad that topic really is. How we die, when we die, why we die, how we celebrate it, how we perceive natural and man-made disasters, crimes of death and punishments by death, death by animals and deaths of animals, all make appearances here. The essays aren't scientific or technical in nature although some do feature brief explanations of the science and medicine behind death,and they aren't deeply philosophical or religious even though some do make you think and examine your soul. The primary mode and motive of the writing is ironic, perhaps what we might expect of an advertising and design guru in the social media age.

A favorite example is the essay on popular songs for funerals, which include the usual inspiring and insipid pop songs, but also the information that many funeral venues have blacklists of songs they won't play, like John Lennon's Imagine, because of the lyric "Imagine there's no heaven." And in the essay on what to do with your cremated loved ones ashes ("known as 'cremains' in the trade"), we learn that one option is to have them pressed into vinyl to produce a record of their favorite songs, and another is to have them stirred into ink for tattoo designs so you can have them stitched into your skin!

The writing isn't uniformly great, again what we might expect since words are not Saatchi"s primary medium. However, there are lapses of grammar and syntax that I can't excuse because these could have and should have been caught by proofreading. When I see these lapses in a published book my first question I would like to ask the writer and publisher is "why should I devote more care and attention to your book than you evidently did as you were producing it?" While the reader can "read around" the mistakes and get the meaning, and these mistakes by no means detract from the central themes, they plant the notion that perhaps the writer didn't take Dead as seriously as the reader wishes he did.

And perhaps Saatchi would say that is precisely the point of Dead: think about living and dying, but doing both well means not taking either (and ourselves in the process) so seriously. After all, it was a picture of a boy leapfrogging a gravestone that brought me to this book and brought such joy to my heart.

[Nick McLaren · Rating 3 out of 5]

More for the coffee table than the book shelf.
I met him once, Charles Saatchi, a thoroughly charming man, we shared a joke at his then partners expense. Two weeks later, he was arrested for assaulting her. I’ve never gotten over the guilt.

[Dana Jerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is like an art show of gore. It is an art book with well-curated photography, and it is excellently done.
If you find real-life horror, murder, deadly animals, accidents and death caught on film interesting, this one is for you.

[Carole LoConte Tedesco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting concept, so-so execution. If you're interested in the macabre, there's no shortage of fascinating vignettes to be found here, but Saatchi doesn't do a very good job of tying the whole together. It's a quick read, and there were quite a few "OMG" moments, but it didn't hold together as a whole work. With that said, the book is physically beautiful and marvelously produced.

[Graham Armstrong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very Very clever and interesting