by Jonathon Green
This is an ill-organized but sporadically interesting collection of deathbed, gallows, suicide and epitaph quotes. Dorothy Parker wanted "Excuse my dust" on her tombstone. Sixteen years before his death, Winston Churchill said, "I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the ordeal of meeting me is another matter." On his deathbed in 1932, biographer Lytton Strachey said, "If this is dying, I don't think much of it." The wife of gangster "Trigger Mike" Coppola wrote him, "You are the lowest and biggest coward I have ever had the misfortune to meet," and then killed herself in 1962. (Quick Fox, $5.95)
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