Obituaries
Jeanne-Claude, Part of a Creative Powerhouse Behind Ephemeral Artworks
Col. Lewis Millett, Who Led 'Bayonet Hill' Charge, Dies at 88
Allen Hughes, Music and Dance Critic for The Times, Dies at 87
John J. O’Connor, a Times TV Critic in Years of Industry Upheaval, Dies at 76
Thomas J. O’Malley, Who Helped Launch Glenn Into Orbit, Dies at 94
Hunter College Professor Who Photographed the People of Harlem Dies at 89
Alice S. Rossi, Sociologist and Feminist Scholar, Dies at 87
Friday, November 20, 2009
Jeanne-Claude, Part of a Creative Powerhouse Behind Ephemeral Artworks
Source: WSJ (11-20-09)
With her husband, Christo, Jeanne-Claude was part of an inseparable artistic duo that produced some of the world's most well-known and monumental works of art.
Jeanne-Claude, who died Nov. 18 in New York City at age 74 after suffering a brain aneurysm, created landmark public displays using textiles, including the 18-foot-high, 24-mile-long "Running Fence" in California and "Surrounded Islands" in which the couple installed giant lily pad-like structures in Florida's Biscayne Bay with 6.4 million square feet of bright-pink fabric. Their 2005 creation, "The Gates," a series of 7,503 orange nylon panels erected for 16 days in New York's Central Park, drew crowds in the middle of winter.
One of their most notable works was the 1995 wrapping of the Reichstag, the seat of the German Parliament in Berlin, in silvery fabric, a project the couple had contemplated for more than two decades. The logistical headaches were so large, Jeanne-Claude once said, that it turned her husband's hair gray and hers red.
Forceful and outspoken, Jeanne-Claude was fond of telling interviewers that there were only three things the couple never did together: fly in an airplane (they took separate flights); make sketches (Christo's job); and manage their taxes (Jeanne-Claude's job). Adding to the vision of two artists merging their creativity was the fact they shared the same birthday.
Jeanne-Claude took the lead in raising funds for projects through the sale of Christo's sketches and other materials to collectors and museums. Such self-financing of large projects is rare in the art world, but the couple said they feared relying on sponsors would compromise their artistic freedom, said their longtime lawyer, Scott Hodes.
Jeanne-Claude avoided galleries, selling directly to collectors. When funds were scarce, she would offer prospective buyers a discount for cash upfront.
To finance a project, Jeanne-Claude told The Wall Street Journal in 1984, "I'll sell almost anything but our son."
Christo often said Jeanne-Claude's contributions to their work went beyond finance and logistics; the basic conception of "Surrounded Islands," he insisted, was hers...
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Col. Lewis Millett, Who Led 'Bayonet Hill' Charge, Dies at 88
Source: NYT (11-18-09)
Col. Lewis L. Millett, an Army veteran of three wars who received the Medal of Honor for leading a rare bayonet charge up a hill in Korea, died Saturday in Loma Linda, Calif. He was 88.
His death was announced by his sister Ellen Larrabee.
Colonel Millett’s forebears fought in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War I. He was so eager to follow in their footsteps that he deserted the American armed forces in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack and joined the Canadian military in the hope of seeing combat quickly. He was eventually court-martialed for desertion, but not before he had returned to the American Army and fought with distinction.
When he became a company commander in the Korean War, serving as a captain in the 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, he seemed a visage from battlefields past with his red handlebar mustache. On Feb. 7, 1951, he employed a tactic of bygone wars with a fury that overwhelmed the enemy.
During the fighting near Osan, South Korea, Captain Millett’s unit encountered Communist troops atop a spot called Hill 180.
It would be remembered as Bayonet Hill for what the military historian Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall would call “the most complete bayonet charge by American troops since Cold Harbor,” a reference to the carnage at an 1864 Civil War battle in Virginia.
After ordering his men to fix bayonets, Captain Millett charged up the hill in front of them in the face of heavy fire, blasting away with his carbine, throwing grenades and, most spectacularly, wielding his bayonet when he encountered three enemy soldiers in a V-shaped gun position.
“I assaulted an antitank rifle crew,” he told Military History magazine in 2002. “The man at the point was the gunner. I bayoneted him. The next man reached for something, I think it was a machine pistol, but I bayoneted him — got him in the throat.”
The third soldier had a submachine gun.
“I guess the sight of me, red-faced and screaming, made him freeze,” he recalled. “Otherwise he would have killed me. I lunged forward and the bayonet went into his forehead. With the adrenaline flowing you’re strong as a bull. It was like going into a watermelon.”
Captain Millett was wounded by grenade fragments, but his men took the hill. President Harry S. Truman presented him with the Medal of Honor in July 1951. As the citation put it, “His dauntless leadership and personal courage so inspired his men that they stormed into the hostile position and used their bayonets with such lethal effect that the enemy fled in wild disorder.”
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Allen Hughes, Music and Dance Critic for The Times, Dies at 87
Source: NYT (11-17-09)
Allen Hughes, a longtime music and dance critic for The New York Times who was known for his encouragement of experimental dance companies and his love of the 20th-century French musical repertory, died on Monday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 87 and had lived in Sarasota since 2003.
The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his wife, Nina.
Mr. Hughes was an urbane observer of the musical and dance worlds, covering them for The Times for 26 years, starting in 1960. He continued to write about dance for the paper after retiring in 1986. He also wrote a book review column for Chamber Music magazine from 1998 to 2002.
Although he spent most of his career writing about music, Mr. Hughes regarded his dance criticism as his most important work. From 1963 to 1965, when he was the chief dance critic of The Times, he championed avant-garde groups, often to the consternation of mainstream ensembles, and advocated for multimedia presentations and other innovations.
He also took up causes. When the Ford Foundation announced $7.7 million in grants to classical ballet organizations in 1963, he objected that the allocation unduly favored George Balanchine’s City Ballet.
“The New York City Ballet,” he wrote, “received $2 million for a 10-year period. Fine. It is a great and glorious company. What did other New York companies get, the American Ballet Theater and the Robert Joffrey Ballet, for example? Not a penny.” ...
Monday, November 16, 2009
John J. O’Connor, a Times TV Critic in Years of Industry Upheaval, Dies at 76
Source: NYT (11-16-09)
John J. O’Connor, who as a television critic for The New York Times for more than 25 years covered the medium as it expanded from a business dominated by three networks to a universe of hundreds of diverse cable and broadcast channels, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 76.
The cause was lung cancer, which had been diagnosed only four weeks ago, said Seymour Barofsky, his partner of 47 years.
Mr. O’Connor joined The Times as a television critic in 1971 and retired in 1997. His tenure coincided with sweeping industry changes, beginning with the advent of the mini-series.
He found the 12-hour “Rich Man, Poor Man” (1976), the first mini-series produced for American television, “somewhat short of great art” and guilty of sentimentality but better than average television fare. In 1977 he criticized “Roots” for stereotypical portrayals and questioned its historical accuracy but concluded that with its premiere, “popular entertainment has, flaws and all, taken a significant step forward.”
No matter what his subject, he kept the industry in mind. When “Masterpiece Theater” imported the British series “Upstairs, Downstairs” in 1974, Mr. O’Connor praised it as “marvelous television.” But he also took the opportunity to compare the show with domestic productions, calling it “another contrast demonstration of the paucity of imagination on American television series.”
Over the years he reviewed both light and serious programming. He called David Frost’s 1977 series of paid interviews with former President Richard M. Nixon “a program with extraordinary impact” that nevertheless raised “serious questions about the contemporary crafts of marketing and communication.”...
Serb Patriarch Pavle dies, spoke for Balkan peace
Source: Miami Herald (11-15-09)
BELGRADE, Serbia -- Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarch Pavle, who called for peace and conciliation during the Balkan ethnic wars of the 1990s but failed to openly condemn extreme Serb nationalism, died Sunday. He was 95.
There have been reports of an internal struggle over who would succeed Pavle, a respected theologian and linguist known for personal humility and modesty. The favorite is influential Bishop Amfilohije, a hard-liner known for his anti-Western and ultra-nationalist stands.
The seven-million member church said its highest body, the Holy Synod, could announce Monday when Pavle's successor will be chosen. At least 40 days must pass after Pavle's death before a new patriarch can be elected.
Pavle took over the church in 1990 just as the collapse of communism ended years of state policy of repressing religion. He often spoke against violence in the ethnic wars Orthodox Serbs fought against Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims during the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II.
"God help us understand that we are human beings and that we must live as human beings, so that peace would come into our country and bring an end to the killing," Pavle had appealed - mostly in vain - in 1991 as fighting raged between Serbs and Croats over disputed territories in Croatia.
José Cisneros: Iconic El Paso artist dies
Source: El Paso Times (11-15-09)
EL PASO -- José Cisneros, the modest, self-taught artist knighted by the king of Spain and celebrated in Texas, Mexico and across the United States, died Saturday.
Cisneros, regarded as a legend for his vivid pen-and-ink sketches of Spanish conquistadores, Franciscan missionaries, frontier settlers and Apache warriors, was 99.
He died of natural causes at an El Paso foster-care home where he was admitted two weeks ago, according to his family.
Born in Villa Ocampo, Durango, in 1910, Cisneros had only a fifth-grade education but was revered as a historian with a sketch pad, an artist who illustrated more than 300 historical books and publications. Stories of the United States-Mexico border and the Southwest burst alive with Cisneros' touch and meticulous attention to detail.
Often described as a world-class illustrator, Cisneros built an international reputation with pen-and-ink illustrations of Mexican, American and Spanish history. He was best known for detailed pen-and-ink drawings of horses and Spanish horsemen that he often described as his favorite subjects.
News of Cisneros' death triggered widespread tributes and condolences. The artist was so modest that he said he never had his work appraised.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Amir Pnueli, Pioneer of Temporal Logic, Dies at 68
Source: NYT (11-14-09)
Amir Pnueli, who turned a philosopher’s explorations of time, logic and free will into a critical technique for verifying the reliability of computers, died on Nov. 2 in Manhattan. He was 68.
The cause of death was a brain hemorrhage, according to New York University, where Dr. Pnueli (pronounced p’new-EL-ee) was a professor of computer science.
In their first few decades, computers were essentially glorified calculators. Numbers were fed in, and after some calculating the answers came out. By the 1970s, programmers knew how to verify that the programs were performing such calculations correctly.
But as computers became more powerful and software more sophisticated — juggling multiple tasks and responding to changing data — verification grew harder. Programmers had to take into account the behavior of the system over time as it responded to new data or instructions while calculating.
In researching the problem, Dr. Pnueli, then at Tel Aviv University, came across the work of the philosopher Arthur Prior, who had developed “tense logic” to evaluate statements whose truthfulness changes over time.
Take the statement “I am tired,” for example. While its meaning does not change, it is sometimes true and sometimes less so, and a person acts differently depending on the extent of tiredness — going to bed versus going on a hike.
In much the same way, a computer’s actions must often adjust to circumstances. If the hard disk is busy reading data for another process, then a command to write data to the hard disk must wait.
“What Pnueli realized is this logic is actually a perfect fit for computer science,” said Moshe Y. Vardi, a professor of computational engineering at Rice University.
James R. Lilley, 81, Envoy in Tiananmen Era, Dies
Source: NYT (11-14-09)
WASHINGTON — James R. Lilley, a former intelligence agent and ambassador to China who viewed that country with a rare blend of pragmatism and love because of his childhood there, died Thursday at a Washington hospital. He was 81.
Mr. Lilley, who lived in Washington, died of complications linked to prostate cancer, said his son Jeffrey of Silver Spring, Md.
Under his old friend President George H. W. Bush, Mr. Lilley was ambassador in Beijing from 1989 to 1991, a period marked by the brutal suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square. “It has been called, and it was, a massacre,” Mr. Lilley declared in “China Hands,” his 2004 memoir, written with his son Jeffrey and published by PublicAffairs.
Mr. Lilley was familiar with the students’ grievances: only days after arriving in Beijing in 1989, he took to riding his bicycle on the streets to glean firsthand knowledge of what was going on.
But while he sympathized with the Chinese students’ yearning for more openness and “an end to cronyism and corruption,” and appreciated the need for the United States to condemn the bloodshed, he argued against any suggestion that Washington’s relationship with China should be cut off or cut back.
“I wanted to make the point that the United States had to stay engaged with China for strategic reasons,” he wrote of his frequent television appearances after the tanks rolled into the square in June 1989. “America, I insisted, could contribute in constructive ways to a more open China.”
Mr. Lilley was almost alone in diplomatic circles for the respect he enjoyed among both the Chinese Communist leaders and the Taiwanese.
Film historian Ken Wlaschin dies at 75
Source: Variety (11-13-09)
Ken Wlaschin, 75, film programmer, historian and author who ran the London Film Festival and later the AFI Film Festival, died Nov. 10 at his home in Palm Springs after a short illness.
A native of Nebraska and a graduate of Dartmouth, Wlaschin pursued further studies at University College in Dublin, where he met Maureen Kennedy Martin, whom he married in 1961 after serving in the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. During the 60s he worked as arts editor and critic for the Rome Daily American, a columnist for the London Daily Sketch and drama series editor for London Weekend Television. He also appeared in two films, The Tramplers, with Joseph Cotten, and Mo.
He became program director of the National Film Theater and the London Film Festival in 1969 and ran the latter with great success until 1984, the longest tenure of anyone in that job to this day.
He returned to the United States to take over as interim director of Filmex in the wake of the demise of that festival's initial incarnation. Once it was reborn as the AFI Fest (aka Los Angeles International Film Festival), Wlaschin brought his internationalist perspective to that event until 1993, during which time he also worked as director of the National Film Theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. For the subsequent decade, he remained at the AFI as director of creative affairs and vice chairman of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation.
Wlaschin also wrote or edited some 20 books, mostly on film or music subjects, but also fiction, poetry and travel. Among his tomes were Bluff Your Way in the Cinema, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World's Great Movie Stars and Their Films, Encyclopedia of Opera on Screen, Gian Carlo Menotti on Screen and Silent Mystery and Detective Movies.
Friday, November 13, 2009
A Pioneering Smokejumper in a Career Marked by Tragedy
Source: WSJ (11-13-09)
On the afternoon of July 12, 1940, Earl Cooley jumped out of an airplane and into history by parachuting to fight an Idaho forest fire, as part of the first team of smokejumpers.
Mr. Cooley, who died Nov. 9 at age 98, went on to become the superintendent of the U.S. Forest Service's first squad of smokejumpers, based in Montana. During World War II, he trained Mennonites and Quakers, conscientious objectors who became smokejumpers for the Forest Service instead of soldiers.
But what had been a casualty-free career took a darker turn when Mr. Cooley was the airborne supervisor who directed a crew of smokejumpers who dropped in to fight the Mann Gulch fire of Aug. 5, 1949, at the Helena National Forest in Montana. Twelve smokejumpers died after the fire unexpectedly worsened, the first fatalities in the new service.
The tragedy became the subject of Norman Maclean's 1992 book, "Young Men and Fire." Mr. Cooley, Mr. Maclean wrote, was "the only smokejumper I ever heard say, 'I don't know why but I was never afraid to jump. It keeps others awake at night.' "
One of 11 children born to homesteaders outside of Hardin, Mont., Mr. Cooley grew up fishing and hunting, and started working for the Forest Service in 1937.
With some of the nation's largest forests, Montana and the Pacific Northwest were plagued with forest fires, many caused by lightning strikes. Although Forest Service officials knew they could minimize damage by getting to fires early, the agency had so far rejected the idea of smokejumpers, who could dig trenches and cut down trees to halt a blaze's spread.
"The best information I can get from experienced fliers is that all parachute jumpers are more or less crazy -- just a little bit unbalanced, otherwise they wouldn't be engaged in such a hazardous undertaking," wrote a regional administrator in 1935.
But in 1939, the Forest Service changed course, and Mr. Cooley was one of the first applicants accepted for smokejumper training. He was still fairly inexperienced when he was called to fight his first fire in 1940.
David Lloyd, 75, Dies; Wrote ‘Chuckles’ Episode
Source: NYT (11-12-09)
David Lloyd, who wrote scores of scripts for some of the most popular television sitcoms of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s — including the memorable Chuckles the Clown episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which was revered by comedy connoisseurs for wringing belly laughs from a funeral — died Tuesday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 75.
The cause was prostate cancer, which was diagnosed 21 years ago, his son Christopher said.
Mr. Lloyd was an astonishingly productive writer by series television standards, not only generating scripts on his own but also working with other writers to doctor scripts in trouble. In addition to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” for which he had credits on more than 30 episodes between 1973 and 1977, Mr. Lloyd wrote for, among other shows, “The Bob Newhart Show,” “Lou Grant,” “Rhoda,” “Phyllis,” “The Tony Randall Show,” “The Associates,” “Taxi,” “Dear John,” “Amen,” “Wings,” “Cheers” and “Frasier.”
In a trade where some are strongest in writing jokes and repartee, others in building characters and still others in shaping stories, Mr. Lloyd was gifted across the board.
“His own work was always in great shape, and he was very helpful on other people’s scripts,” said Bob Ellison, who worked with Mr. Lloyd on “Mary Tyler Moore,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and others. “He lit up the writer’s room when he came in. And that’s a big part of the job, bringing the room to life, resuscitating it.”
He was also the creator of the series “Brothers,” which ran for several seasons in the 1980s on the cable network Showtime after being rejected by broadcast networks because a main character was gay.
“He was maybe the most highly respected television comedy writer of all time, and very likely the most prolific,” said Les Charles, a producer of “Cheers,” “Taxi” and “Frasier,” among other shows. “He was the first writer we asked to write for ‘Cheers.’ ” He added: “You get an episodic writer to give you four or five shows a season, that’s tremendous. David would do 10 or 12.”
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Gene D. Cohen, Geriatric Psychiatrist, Dies at 65
Source: NYT (11-12-09)
Gene D. Cohen, a pioneer in the field of geriatric psychiatry who helped shift the emphasis in gerontological research from the problems of people as they age to their potential, died Saturday at his home in Kensington, Md. He was 65.
The cause was metastatic prostate cancer, his wife, Wendy Miller, said. At his death, Dr. Cohen was the founding director of the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities at George Washington University and had held leadership positions at the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Mental Health.
Dr. Cohen was an expert on what happens in the brain as it ages and on Alzheimer’s disease. Both as a researcher and as a spokesman for research in gerontology — he was often a guest on television news programs and made a series of public service messages with the comedian George Burns — he was instrumental in bringing information about aging to the public.
His outlook was optimistic, which he conveyed in books for general audiences. As research in the 1990s began to show that the brain was less susceptible to being ravaged by age than had previously been thought, he spoke to news organizations, television audiences, legislators and potential research patrons, emphasizing that aging is not in itself a cause of debilitation of the brain; more often, he said, disease is the cause.
“He was one of the founders of geriatric psychiatry,” said Gay Hanna, executive director of the Center for Creative Aging, an organization that studies the relationship between creativity and healthy aging and that Dr. Cohen brought to George Washington. No one, she added, had more understanding of “phenomena happening in the brain as we age, and their effect on psychosocial and cognitive development.”
Dr. Cohen devoted much of the last decade and a half of his life to exploring the relationship between aging and creativity. He was the project director for a study, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, that assessed the impact on older people of cultural programs provided by professional artists. He invented and copyrighted a number of games — a combination of chess and Scrabble, for example — to stimulate and exercise the brains of elderly people.
Thomas J. O’Malley, Who Helped Launch Glenn Into Orbit, Dies at 94
Source: NYT (11-12-09)
Thomas J. O’Malley, the aviation engineer who pushed the button that launched the rocket that carried John Glenn into orbit in 1962, and who five years later played a major role in reviving the Apollo moon program after a launching-pad fire killed three astronauts, died Friday in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 94 and lived in Cocoa Beach.
The cause was pneumonia, his daughter, Kathleen O’Malley, said.
At the height of the cold war, with the United States still reeling from the haunting beep-beep-beep of Sputnik — the first artificial satellite, launched into space by the Soviet Union in 1957 — Mr. O’Malley was sent to Cape Canaveral by his company, General Dynamics, as its leading test engineer.
The company’s Convair division had built the Atlas, an intercontinental ballistic missile, and then received a federal contract to convert it into a spacecraft capable of lifting astronauts into orbit. Too often, to the further frustration of America’s space dreams, the Atlas had blown up on the launching pad. The company feared it would lose the contract.
Mr. O’Malley was “Convair’s toughest test conductor,” the astronauts Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Deke Slayton wrote in their history of the space program, “Moon Shot” (Turner Publishing, 1994). He “took no lip from anyone” and created a team that was “anxious to work day and night and turn the Atlas into a fine piece of reliable machinery,” they wrote.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2007, Mr. O’Malley said, “We had one goal: to get something up there as soon as possible.”
On the morning of Feb. 20, 1962, Mr. O’Malley pressed the button that fired the Atlas booster rockets and sent Mr. Glenn on his way to becoming the first American to orbit the Earth.
Tape recordings caught Mr. O’Malley’s words at that moment: “May the good Lord ride all the way.”
Donald Harington, Ozark Surrealist, Dies at 73
Source: NYT (11-12-09)
Donald Harington, who created a surreal rural mini-world in more than a dozen novels set in the fictional Ozark hamlet of Stay More, Ark., died Saturday in Springdale, Ark. He was 73 and lived in Fayetteville, Ark.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his wife, Kim.
Mr. Harington, who never achieved popular success but attracted a devoted cult following, blended myth, dreamscape and sharply observed Ozark speech and manners to depict a rural society whose richness and eccentricity drew the inevitable comparisons to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.
He rebuffed attempts to classify him as a regional writer, telling The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2000: “Regionalism is a term of opprobrium, condescension or contempt. The term ‘regionalist’ doesn’t really say anything about a writer except that the writer prefers writing about a specific place.”
That place, Stay More, whose residents Mr. Harington called Stay Morons, turned out to be a strange one, populated by shrewd hillbillies, reclusive millionaires, an itinerant motion-picture projectionist, a candidate for governor who wants to abolish hospitals and schools, and, in “The Cockroaches of Stay More,” talking insects who constitute their own Ozark subsociety.
“Don Harington is not an underappreciated novelist,” the poet Fred Chappell told The Democrat-Gazette. “He is an undiscovered continent.”
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Hunter College Professor Who Photographed the People of Harlem Dies at 89
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (12-31-69)
When, as a budding photographer, Roy DeCarava applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952, his proposal stated: "I want to show the strength, the wisdom, the dignity of the Negro people. Not the famous and the well known, but the unknown and the unnamed, thus revealing the roots from which springs the greatness of all human beings."
That year he became the first African-American photographer to receive a Guggenheim, and he spent 57 more years advancing his goals. He was still pursuing them last month just before he died, six weeks shy of his 90th birthday.
Mr. DeCarava, one of the most celebrated of American photographers, taught photography at the City University of New York's Hunter College from 1975 until his death after a brief illness.
A distinguished professor of art at Hunter since 1988, Mr. DeCarava was acclaimed for his images of Harlem and of jazz musicians. He won the National Medal of Arts in 2006.
He drew most of his subject matter from everyday life in Harlem. As he told The Chronicle in 1997, his art reflected his sense of responsibility to black Americans: "It was unjust that they should go through life unseen."
On a Facebook page created in Mr. DeCarava's honor, former students have thanked him both for lessons in photography—for instance, his instruction that if you have to use a zoom lens, then you're not close enough to the scene to capture it—and for broader guidance. He taught, as one former student puts it, "that to shoot life, you have to live it."
In images that were as artistic as they were documentary, Mr. DeCarava depicted neighbors singing, workmen trudging home, and musicians playing, embracing, or merely walking from the stage. His subjects' purpose, perseverance, and elegance despite dire circumstances embodied "a life force that each of us has, a will to live and a will to be here," he said...
Soviet H-bomb scientist Ginzburg dies
Source: Yahoo News (11-9-09)
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Vitaly Ginzburg, a Russian physicist who survived Stalin's purges by working on the Soviet atomic bomb project and later won the Nobel Prize for physics, died in Moscow late on Sunday after a long illness. He was 93.
Ginzburg won the 2003 Nobel physics prize for developing the theory behind superconductors, materials which allow electricity to pass without resistance at very low temperatures. He shared the prize with British-American Anthony Leggett and Russian-born U.S. scientist Alexei Abrikosov.
But Ginzburg's career as a Soviet scientist almost ended when he took as his second wife a woman arrested in 1944 and sentenced to three years in labor camps for supposedly plotting against Stalin's life. State anti-Semitism was flourishing and an attack on Ginzburg was published in a journal.
"I can only guess what fate awaited me in this situation at this time," Ginzburg wrote in an autobiographical article written for the Nobel prize committee. "I think that it would have cost me dear but I was saved by the hydrogen bomb."
Ginzburg wrote that he worked together with fellow Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov -- later a famous dissident -- on the Soviet H-bomb project and said they developed the two key ideas which made it possible to create the device.
But in 1951, Ginzburg was dismissed from the atom bomb project as Stalin led a fresh campaign of anti-Semitism which aimed to blame Jews for the Soviet Union's problems and exile them into labor camps.
"It was a tremendous luck that the Great Leader did not have enough time to carry out what he had planned to do and died, or was killed, on 5th March 1953," Ginzburg wrote in the article...
Monday, November 9, 2009
Alice S. Rossi, Sociologist and Feminist Scholar, Dies at 87
Source: NYT (11-7-09)
Alice S. Rossi, a noted sociologist and feminist scholar who was a founder of the National Organization for Women, died on Tuesday in Northampton, Mass. She was 87 and lived in Amherst, Mass. The cause was pneumonia, her son, Peter E. Rossi, said. At her death, Professor Rossi was the Harriet Martineau professor of sociology emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, where she had taught from 1974 until her retirement in 1991. In her scholarship, Professor Rossi explored the status of women in work, family and sexual life. An early public advocate of abortion rights, she was often quoted by the national news media on an array of women’s issues. Her writings are widely credited with helping build the platform on which the women’s movement of the 1960s and afterward was erected. Professor Rossi was best known for her studies of people’s lives — those of women in particular — as they move from youth to age. She edited several books on the subject, including “Gender and the Life Course” (Aldine, 1985); “Sexuality Across the Life Course” (University of Chicago, 1994); and “Caring and Doing for Others: Social Responsibility in the Domains of Family, Work and Community” (University of Chicago, 2001). One of her most influential feminist articles was “Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal.” First presented in 1963 at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, it was published the next year in the academy’s journal Daedalus. In the article, Professor Rossi argued that for most women motherhood had become a full-time occupation, a state of affairs that hurt not only women but also the larger society in which they lived. For the well-being of both the women and the culture, she wrote, parity of the sexes is essential. Familiar today, Professor Rossi’s argument was considered subversive at the time. As a result, she was called a monster, an unnatural woman and an unfit mother, as she recalled in interviews afterward. Her article can be found in the anthology “Life Cycle and Achievement in America” (Harper & Row, 1969), edited by Rose Laub Coser. In later work, also controversial, Professor Rossi argued that the cultural divide between men and women was not the product of socialization alone, as the prevailing view held, but was partly rooted in inborn biological differences between the sexes.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
William Belton, Self-Taught Ornithologist, Dies at 95
Source: NYT (11-4-09)
Once upon a time, every tweet had an actual bird attached. If that bird happened to live in southern Brazil, a region whose rich avian life was long undocumented, chances are good that it was stalked repeatedly — and its tweets, coos and whistles recorded patiently — by William Belton.
An internationally recognized ornithologist, Mr. Belton was almost single-handedly responsible for the current body of knowledge of the bird life of Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost Brazilian state. His field recordings and specimens from the region are today in the collections of major research institutions. His two-volume study of the birds of the area is widely considered seminal.
Mr. Belton’s accomplishments are all the more unusual in that as an ornithologist, he was completely self-taught. An American diplomat who served in high posts in Latin America and elsewhere before embarking, in retirement, on an ornithological career of more than 30 years, Mr. Belton died on Oct. 25 at 95. His death, at his home in Great Cacapon, W.Va., was from congestive heart failure, his son Hugh said.
Among Mr. Belton’s most significant achievements was making more than a thousand field recordings of birds, most in Rio Grande do Sul. Now in the archives of Cornell University, his recordings document the sounds of several hundred different species.
While many others have recorded birds in the field, Mr. Belton’s work was noteworthy for its methodical approach, its comprehensiveness and the sheer length of time he devoted to it, associates said in interviews recently. He first recorded the birds of Rio Grande do Sul in 1971, lugging a heavy reel-to-reel tape recorder and directional microphone. He made his last recordings there in 1993, when he was nearly 80...
George Na'ope, Master of Sacred Hula, Dies at 81
Source: NYT (11-5-09)
George Na’ope, whose mastery of the hula — the flowing, pantomimic dance of Hawaii — and its lilting chants made him a last link between an ancient ritual and modern entertainment, died on Oct. 26 at his home in Hilo, Hawaii. He was 81.
The cause was lung disease, said Iwalani Kalima, his student and caretaker for more than 40 years.
Known as Uncle George to thousands of fans, the diminutive Mr. Na’ope (he stood barely five feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds) was considered a hula lo’ea, or hula master, according to Maile Loo, executive director of the Hula Preservation Society in Kaneohe, Hawaii.
“We view him as the last of the great masters who spent their life training and teaching hula,” Ms. Loo said in an interview on Tuesday. “His reach around the world is unmatched.”
For more than 60 years Mr. Na’ope (pronounced na-OH-peh) taught hula and chanting in Europe, South America, Australia, Japan and in the continental United States. Although he had a long career performing the more modern mode of the dance, even comic versions, his greater role was in inspiring native Hawaiians to revive their sacred dance.
In 1964 Mr. Na’ope was a founder of the Merrie Monarch Festival, a weeklong event held each spring in Hilo celebrating traditional Hawaiian art, crafts, music and dance. The festival has achieved worldwide recognition for its contributions to history and culture. A highlight of the week is a three-day hula competition. Mr. Na’ope would often appear in a broad-brimmed hat adorned with long feathers and silk tropical foliage, gold medallions around his neck and oversized rings on each of his fingers.
Unlike some Polynesian dances, the hula began as a form of worship, evolving into a form of entertainment only in the 20th century. Every body movement or hand gesture had a specific meaning. A movement might represent a particular plant or animal, symbolize war or peace. In imitating a shark or waving palm tree, the true hula dancer believed that he or she had become the shark or palm.
“The old style is accompanied by a chant, our version of a song that tells a story,” Ms. Loo said. “Because we had no written language, everything was preserved through the chants: our history, our values, the stories of our leaders; thousands of lines of poetry.”
Modern hula — often accompanied by ukulele, steel guitars or piano — usually does not involve chanting. “In sacred hula you use hollowed gourds, drums made from trunks of coconut trees with a shark skin over the top; water-worn pebbles that are clicked together,” Ms. Loo said.
Through his workshops, concerts and the festival, Mr. Na’ope sought to revive tradition...
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Palestinian revolutionary dies
Source: The American Task Force on Palestine (11-3-09)
Sakher Habash, the Palestinian revolutionary and intellectual who died on Sunday after a stroke aged 70, devoted the greater part of his life to the Palestinian struggle.
Known by his nom de guerre Abu Nizar, Habash was a founding member of the Fatah Party and although he supported the Oslo process of talks with Israel in the mid-1990s, he never rejected armed resistance. Violence, he argued, was a legitimate way for Palestinians to struggle for their rights.
To the end, like his lifelong compadre Yasser Arafat, Habash donned the revolutionary uniform.
In 2002, after the second intifada had broken out and Israeli forces invaded Ramallah, he even picked up arms one last time, and holed up in a building to repel the invading Israeli tanks.
He also cultivated other interests, was a prolific writer of both poetry and history, writing among other things a history of the Fatah movement, and became known as one of the party’s intellectuals.
“He was a multifaceted man,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the executive committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. “He was an avid reader and writer. Every meeting we had, he would sit down and write a poem and send it to me afterwards.”
Habash regularly hosted members of every faction as well as community leaders at his home in Ramallah, and Palestinian unity was very much a priority for him.
“He was a unifier. He was very pleasant and very positive,” Ms Ashrawi said. “Even after he had his first stroke, his innate humanity always shone through. He was always looking for productive ways to solve problems.”
Perhaps as a result of his close reading of history, Habash had a sense of propriety. He made it his business to make sure that Palestinians who had been killed in fighting with Israel were remembered and pressured local authorities to name streets after them.
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