Mobituaries
Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving
By: Mo Rocca (& Jonathan Greenberg)
Mo Rocca, correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, has a love for obituaries. He has coined his own term ‘(mo)bituary’ as a way to “appreciate someone who didn’t get the love she or he deserved the first time around.”
Mobituaries is part obituary, part history with a side of humor and a dash of politics.
Where else can you find a comparison between Thomas Paine and T-Pain, a discussion on dragons, the definition of a disco biscuit, and a list of trees that died too soon, all in one place?!
This is a mostly entertaining book as I do enjoy learning odd trivia and history and Rocca is fairly witty. My interest did wan a bit towards the end of the middle. Rocca loves theater so there were many references to plays, songs, and people revolving around theater or TV from years past that I didn’t know. In those cases, knowing the context would have made that particular mobituary more interesting.
The biggest thing this book lacks is PICTURES!
I had to google so many things to see what they looked like. I think it would have been a great addition to include pictures, even if they were in black and white, to help visualize who these people were and what these places or things looked like. I’m not sure why they didn’t do this. Almost every page I was wanting a visual.
I thought the formatting of this book was clever. Each mobituary was titled ‘Death of a….’ and then had a related addendum. For example: “Death of a Leviathan: The Station Wagon” had the addendum- “…and Other Things from the ‘70s That Could've Killed Us”
Interspersed among these are brief “Forgotten Forerunners” about people with great achievements that didn’t get proper recognition during their time. Like the first computer programmer, the first great wall, the technically first African-American MLB player, etc.
Most of the chapters are for specific people (like the Siamese twins who lived in Tennessee, Audrey Hepburn, or Sammy Davis Jr.), but he also gives attention to things like dragons, medieval science, a sports team, fashion trends, Prussia, people with only one eye, or defunct diagnoses.
An entertainingly broad spectrum.
At the end of the introduction, Rocca included a lovely sentence diagram of the first line of Bill Cosby’s obit (that doesn’t exist yet) and made me realize I’ve never truly diagrammed a sentence and I immediately wanted to. Grammar nerd alert. This had little bearing on this book at all but I felt compelled to give it some attention here:
As to Rocca’s wit, here are a few excerpts:
“President Glover Cleveland discovered a tumor in his mouth that was growing much faster than America’s struggling economy.”
“Like a lot of men’s fashion, the codpiece was born out of practicality. And like anything men do, it was soon carried way too far.”
“Over the years, Shakespeare’s reputation has survived more assassination attempts than the Road Runner.”
And if you’re wondering what kind of useful things you will learn within these pages, here are a few highlights:
St. Augustine seems to be the main authority for claiming dragons can fly
After Einstein died there was a lot of studying done on his brain which subsequently ‘disappeared’ and then found 23 years later. (I think there should probably be a sci-fi movie created about someone stealing Einstein’s brain.)
‘Macaroni’ meant ‘fashionable’ (i.e. That hat is so macaroni!) Thus, the song Yankee Doodle Dandy is making fun of Yankees who put feathers in their hats and thought they were cool. So embarrassing.
Herbert Hoover standardized many things which was actually pretty life changing. Some of these products were milk sizes, brick sizes, traffic lights being red, yellow, green, and light sockets. Standardizing is something we’ve never really had to think about and definitely something we’ve taken for granted!
Audrey Hepburn was born the same year as Anne Frank and endured some of the hardships of WWII in Holland, almost starving. Anne Frank’s dad tried to get Hepburn to play Anne on-screen.
Okay, this one shocked me— in Family Matters, Laura and Eddie had a little sister named Judy! But she was more of a background character so when Urkel came on the show and became so popular Judy randomly disappeared! Apparently I never saw the earlier episodes...
Mahatma Gandhi and Orville Wright died on the same day.
The station wagon got its name because the earliest ones transported people from railroad stations to hotels.
And because I know you’ve been wondering since I mentioned it earlier, a disco biscuit is a slang term for recreational drugs like ecstasy that was popular in the ‘60s.
I feel like by now you should be able to gauge whether you would like this book or not. But if you are still unsure, many of the things he has included in his book are things he’s talked about on his podcast (same name). So if you are more into listening than reading, you may want to check that out!
One other thing I’ll mention about Mobituaries is that the majority of the people selected were selected (I’m assuming) because the reason they didn’t get a fair shake was due to their race, gender, or sexuality or because they were activists for civil, women’s, or LGBTQ rights. Rocca himself is gay so I think he was drawn to many of these people/stories for that connection. But the commentary for many of these chapters highlights some of these.
I wouldn’t say it was an overtly political book by any means, but it would make sense that depending on the time period they were alive, certain people’s accomplishments would not be brought to light or given the credit they deserved.
I love the idea of this book and appreciate the research Rocca has done to put it together and creatively pull in surprising connections! I would think there is potential for second editions of this book and I would probably read them. (Hopefully with a few less obscure theater/TV references for those of us who never watched silent films or Barbra Streisand.)
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