Michael A. Stusser

If it hadn’t been my book club selection for the month, I never would have picked up Michael Stusser’s The Dead Guy Interviews. I can’t really say that I’m glad I did. Dead Guy Interviews is a series of very short chapters about 45 famous (dead) people, each consisting of a page with some factual information followed by an imaginary interview of the subject by Mr. Stusser. The glib and silly interviews made an attempt at humor, but fell short.

As with most books I read, I began at the beginning. Within minutes, however, I realized that there was no way I’d be able to get through this book in the ten days left before my book club meeting. So I rambled through, choosing to read only about those dead guys that interested me the most. There was lots of information I hadn’t previously known (Beethoven had poor hygiene, Alexander the Great was in love with a eunuch) and will surely forget after a week or two. There were also a few facts that did interest me: Gautama Buddha was slim, with blue eyes and curly hair. The potbellied laughing figure I associated with Buddha is really a representation of an obese Chinese monk named Hotei. What did strike me more than any of the information in the book was the fact that Mao spoke such broken English in the interviews, yet Confucius spoke the language flawlessly. I also marveled over Einstein’s and Freud’s heavy accents(“Zere is no slip of zee tongue or dream vithout meanink!”), whereas Beethoven had absolutely no trouble at all. It seems that Stusser did an enormous amount of research for this book, yet he was unable to get rid of the stereotypical images of his subjects.

I imagine that the appropriate audience for this book is a teenage reluctant reader who would like to know a little about some famous historical figures. It definitely isn’t me.… (mais)

Michael Stusser regularly interviews dead people and publishes the interviews in Mental Floss Magazine . He has other personality quirks, too, I'm sure. This is his first collection of dead people interviews in book form.

The material is written tongue in cheek, which makes it very hard to type. The writing style reminds me of Monty Python. The deceased interviewees always have something surprising to say. Genghis Kahn: "Helmet is key. Tell kids, when you ride - must wear helmet." Sigmund Freud: "Man says to his friend, 'I've been making a lot of Freudian slips lately.' 'Like vat?' asks his friend. 'Vell, last week I asked the train conductor for two pickets to Tittsburgh.'"


Some of the interviews chosen for the book are with people that might not make your, or my , A-list, particularly the women. Mae West, Frieda Kahlo, Coco Channel, Oscar Wilde . . . Oh I was talking about the women, never mind. Of course, you have your Napoleon Bonaparte, your Caligula and your Albert Einstein too.

I'm looking forward to volume two, as long as Stusser doesn't want to interview me for it.

I'll Never Forget The Day I Read A Book!… (mais)

The Dead Guy Interviews is based on the intriguing premise that forty-five of history’s greatest, and most interesting, people can be summoned back to life long enough to sit for an interview with the author. The theory goes that Michael Stusser will ask the hard questions, questions that would have in some cases probably gotten him killed if he had dared to ask them during the actual lifetimes of his subjects. Stusser will combine insightful questions and humor in his interviews in a way that will provide the reader with forty-five painless little history lessons. So much for the theory, because in reality, this hit-and-miss book is more miss than hit.

Stusser interviews Beethoven, Napoleon, Churchill, Einstein, Darwin, Freud, Hoover, Poe, Mae West, Wilde, Crazy Horse, Washington, Lincoln, Julius Caesar, Buddha and thirty others. Each interview runs five or six pages and is introduced by a one-page biography of the person being interviewed. The interviews seldom fail to offer at least one or two lesser known, but intriguing, historical facts about their subjects but so many of the questions are phrased in such a sophomoric style of humor that the facts are soon overwhelmed by the silliness. And because Stusser sometimes has his historical figures respond in the same tone in which the questions are asked, many of them seem to have the same personality regardless of what they accomplished in life or in what era they lived. After a while it starts to seem that everyone who comes back to life does so with the personality of Don Rickles.

Although many, if not most, of the interviews stress the sex lives of those answering the questions, with Stusser seeming to take particular delight in pointing out how many great figures of history were either homosexual or bisexual, some of the conversations do serve as good capsule histories. Unfortunately, because of the numerous sex jokes and the constant trading of insults between interviewer and interviewee, those conversations do not happen as often as they could have.

More typical is the way that the interviewer begins his session with Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.

Michael Stusser: Gotta ask about the facial hair. Why not trim up the old mono-brow and wax the ‘stache, you know?

Frida Kahlo: Yes, I now see this is going to be like sitting with a pig for an hour. Why don’t you shave your back?

But along the way we are reminded of Beethoven’s deafness, that Mozart may have suffered from Tourette’s syndrome, that only seven of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published in her lifetime, and we learn how Harry Houdini (and Siegfried and Roy) made an elephant disappear on stage. Stusser provides the kind of historical trivia that puts a human face on history’s legends but the book is ultimately less a history lesson than it is a book filled with jokes written at the expense of those legends.

Rated at: 2.5… (mais)