The Media is too often a convenient scapegoat. Whether you're a parent concerned about violence on TV, or a pundit protesting the negative coverage (or lack thereof) muddling a nation's foreign policies, the Media somehow manages to lurk behind it all. What is overlooked in such glib reasoning is the fact that such a monster would not exist without an audience to sustain it, an audience of readers and viewers figured all too simplistically as its passive victims.

Mitchell Fink has seen the monster and the monster is us. Or so he suggests in the introduction to The Last Days of Dead Celebrities:

We watch [celebrities] on TV, and in darkened movie theaters. We listen to their CDs, read their autobiographies, and cheer them on the playing field. We follow their exploits in gossip columns, and keep count of their marriages and divorces. Sometimes we even vote for them.

Fink, himself a journalist, follows this nuanced analysis with narrative reconstructions of 15 celebrity deaths. His definition of celebrity is broad enough to include the usual subjects like John Lennon, John Belushi, and Tupac Shakur, as well as less widely familiar figures as actor and teacher Lee Strasberg and songwriter Warren Zevon.

Fink's profiles are most compelling when going into unfamiliar or overlooked territory. He manages to make the recording of Zevon's last album, The Wind, both suspenseful and poignant as Zevon races to finish before succumbing to cancer on September 7, 2003. Equally affecting are those moments that fail to fit within the typical obituary. Days after John Lennon's murder by Mark David Chapman on December 8, 1980, Yoko Ono remembered some chocolate she had bought for her husband. According to Fink,

"I didn't like chocolate at all," she said. "But after John's passing, I thought, 'Should I throw it away? No, that would be wasteful.' So I said to myself, 'Well, okay, I'm going to eat the chocolate, you know. And I did."

The Last Days of Dead Celebrities is sobering and compulsively readable proof that we have more in common with celebrities than we think or want to think about. Fink, in his introduction, believes "that the feelings we exhibit during our last days will turn out to be very much like the ones experienced by the fifteen dead celebrities in this bookÑfrantic and numb, fearful and gallant, dazed and resolute, hopeless, hapless, hopped up, and happy. In other words, terminally unique and completely all over the place."