No matter what your station in society, everybody has to go sometime. Even the wealthy, powerful, and world-renowned must ultimately meet their Maker—though some have departed this life more ignobly than they might have wished.

• From Mozart to rock and roll, which performers ended their lives on the wrong note?
• What famous U.S. bridge is named after an explorer who was eaten by cannibals?
• Everyone wants to hit the lottery, but does Lady Luck visit winners with deadly fangs?
• Plus: Learn the real fate of Gilligan's Island castaways and all your favorite TV actors as well as famous writers, senators, saints, dictators, and philosophers, among many others.

Michael Largo, the man who illuminated readers on the myriad ways of death in Final Exits, has compiled a fascinating, off-beat, and darkly humorous necrology that provides the grim, often outrageous details about the passing of influential persons. Meticulously researched—employing archaeological records, published obituaries, official documents, and forensic evidence—this authoritative, one-of-a-kind reference presents the unabashed truth about a multitude of celebrity deaths, while examining the various deeds, misdeeds, and lifestyle quirks that hastened the demise and determined the departed's role in history and popular myth. The Portable Obituary has the skinny on what made our late icons—whether through overindulgence or neglect: on the john, in the sack, or in some spectacular accident—what they are today: dead!

This macabre, funny, off-beat follow-up to "Final Exits" is an authoritative and luridly compelling collection that presents the true circumstances behind the deaths of famous figures from Aeschylus to Elvis. Illustrated.

Here at last is the definitive source book on the true causes of death of public figuresandndash;andndash;providing the ultimate demise of heroes and icons, politicians and celebrities, inventors and explorers, business leaders and sports figures, as well as the unlikely endings of radicals, murderers, feminists, Nobel Prize winners, and others. Organized thematically, THE PORTABLE OBITUARY examines revealing details about how famous persons' deeds, intimate habits, and lifestylesandndash;andndash;good and badandndash;andndash;ultimately influenced their mode of death and, in due course, determined their role in history and culture. Author Michael Largo makes clear that life, famous or not, can only be fully understood backwards. The true cause of death is often the one omitted detail of history, but in fact reveals the most poignant snapshot of an individual's life.

There is no other work that reviews the lives of the prominent, illustrious, and legendary from the cause of death vantage point, presenting unique, meaningful, and original thumbnail biographies. By using archeological records, published obituaries, techniques of forensic interpretationandndash;andndash;THE PORTABLE OBITUARY is a oneandndash;ofandndash;aandndash;kind reference work.

Michael Largo has been collecting statistics and information on the American way of dying for over a decade. He is the author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die and three novels, the former editor of New York Poetry, and the researcher/archivist for the film company Allied Artists in Atlanta. He lives in Miami with his family.