You Can't Be Too Careful

By David Pryce-Jones

Book Overview

A heavy drinker decides to cut down his alcohol intake-and dies of a heart attack caused by alcohol withdrawl. Then there's the murderer who was accidentally electrocuted sitting on his prison cell's steel toilet--just after escaping the electric chair on appeal. You can't be too careful, not in a universe that began with a random Big Bang and whose only certainty is accident. A collection of cautionary tales gathered for years by David Pryce-Jones and illustrated with characteristic wit and precision by Pierre Le-Tan, these are succinct items whose very matter-of-factness seems to reinforce the utterly bewildering nature of life and death, the unlikely, improbable, unexpected way in which lives are swallowed up-this is the human comedy as one-liners, each with a wondrous and terrifying grain of truth about our existence.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1563051567
• ISBN13: 9781563051562
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Workman Publishing
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Wickedly funny

This wonderful little book is a collection of vignettes gleaned from newspaper clippings about accidental deaths of all varieties. As the author points out in his introduction, life is largely just a collection of accidents, the majority of which are mundane. But every once in a while an accident will have an aspect of the tragic or the comic about it. Very rarely the two will both be present, and it is in the presentation of these strange and ironic events that the book achieves a type of high art. It is not enough to be concerned about accidental death, one also has to worry about how one dies, lest the memory of one's death elicit chuckles, snickers or outright hysteria, instead of sighs or respectful platitudes. Many of the catalogued deceased were silly, careless, clumsy, or even stupid, but many were just unlucky - in the wrong place at the wrong time, when death came calling. It could have been you, or, much worse, me. In these cautionary tales ordinary everyday objects like toothpicks, ice cream, buttons, rings, potted plants, kittens, etc. , are shown to have sinister, deadly potential. Below are a few of my favourite entries. Read and beware: -A couple's lovemaking on top of a 220-foot cliff ended in death for one of them, an inquest at Newport, Isle of Wight, was told. They were kissing, cuddling, and rolling about when Mr Michael R. rolled over the cliff edge. 'Michael was alongside me, and in due course, on top of me,' Mrs C. said. 'We had not had sex, but we were contemplating it. About that time he appeared to slip away from me. He did not make any sound at all. I think he may have rolled over a couple of times. I grasped hold of the grass to stop myself from slipping over. I managed to look over the cliff and saw he had gone down feet first with his arms in the air, and then out of sight.' -A 34 year old man from died of blood poisoning in Varna, Bulgaria, after his wife, who had eaten contaminated fish, playfully bit the lobe of his ear. -Nine people died in Ho Chi Minh City after a bridge collapsed under the weight of a fifty-strong crowd that had gathered to watch a girl commit suicide. The girl was rescued. -Mr David G. of Bristol broke his neck when he dived from Torquay Pier into eighteen inches of water. He failed to notice that the tide had gone out.