Genius and Heroin - by Michael Largo (Paperback)

About the Book

"Genius and Heroin" chronicles the lives of the famously talented who have entwined their genius with the path toward self-ruin. With 250 illustrations and photographs, as well as sidebars highlighting curious facts, this guide is the definitive sourcebook on how the notoriously creative have lived and died.

From the Back Cover

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.

Review Quotes

"Largo reveals the secrets of the celebrated dead!" - Miami Herald

"Amazingly entertaining." - Maxim

"Meticulous, fascinating, and often intriguingly bizarre . . . I am full of admiration for his achievement--just the ideal book for bathroom reading." - Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman

"Chockablock with faces, figures, and facts Michael Largo's Genius and Heroin makes for mad good reading on the divinely inspired, hopelessly self-destructive class. Poe, Piaf, Warhol anyone?" - Elle