Book Review: "Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages"

I've been reading Michael Largo's book, " Genius and Heroin: The Illustrated Catalogue of Creativity, Obsession, and Reckless Abandon Through the Ages" (Harper Paperbacks, 2008), and it's an engrossing one.
He goes A to Z through famous creative figures throughout history, from classical times, including Diogenes, deciding to live life like a dog; to Romantic poets like Lord Byron, a man who was the study of excess; to Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain, whose 1994 suicide (though some continue to whisper murder) is still mourned to this day.
Is it scholarly? Not quite. It's more an engrossing, guilty pleasure of a read. Largo has put together a fascinating, eye-opening book, very user friendly, with bits of scandalous history served up in bite-size snippets. Whether you want to read it from A to Z, or whether you want to randomly open it up and start to browse, it doesn't matter; it's all part of the fun.
No entry is longer than two pages, and some are a mere short paragraph. In between names he goes on small asides and sidebars, listing deaths by drowning, discussing moonshine, and naming surprising quirks -- and plenty more. Quotes pepper the text quite liberally, and there are plenty of photos, engravings and more, so it retains a high level of visual appeal and the sometimes odd images stimulate one's curiosity even further.
It's definitely macabre -- making it quite possibly the perfect gift for a goth type -- and reading it you'll likely be going "Oh my God, really?" at a lot of the content, but in spite of that (or maybe because of that) it does have that rubber-necking appeal.
Largo's style doesn't judge or pity; he merely reports the stories behind these often-tormented geniuses, and reveals some little-heard of artists and writers along the way. It's a who's who of decadence and over-indulgences, starring Charles Bukowski, Edith Piaf, Edgar Allan Poe, Tupac Shakur, Oscar Wilde, and hundreds more in between.