Saturday, September 27, 2008

Pg. 69: Michael Largo's "Genius and Heroin"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Michael Largo's Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages.

About the book, from the publisher:
What is the price of brilliance?

Why are so many creative geniuses also ruinously self-destructive? From Caravaggio to Jackson Pollack, from Arthur Rimbaud to Jack Kerouac, from Charlie Parker to Janis Joplin, to Kurt Cobain, and on and on, authors and artists throughout history have binged, pill-popped, injected, or poisoned themselves for their art. Fully illustrated and addictively readable, Genius and Heroin is the indispensable reference to the untidy lives of our greatest artists and thinkers, entertainingly chronicling how the notoriously creative lived and died—whether their ultimate downfalls were the result of opiates, alcohol, pot, absinthe, or the slow-motion suicide of obsession.
Learn more about the book and author at Michael Largo's website.

Michael Largo is the author of three novels, the Bram Stoker Award-winning Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die, and last year's The Portable Obituary: How the Famous, Rich, and Powerful Really Died.

The Page 69 Test: Genius and Heroin.

--Marshal Zeringue