Robert Sheckley, 1928-2005
When I was a teenage science fiction fan, avidly catching up with about five decades worth of stories from the Astounding era onward, Robert Sheckley was one of my favorite discoveries. His stories had...
View ArticleGordon Parks, 1912-2006
Gordon Parks died yesterday at the age of 93. Not only as the author of a book on ’70s Hollywood, but simply as a lover of great film, I was familiar with Parks’s movies, but they were only one facet...
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James Brown, 1933-2006
It’s worth taking a moment to break from our largely literary focus today, I think. Christmas just isn’t the same without James Brown—oh, I’ve still got my recordings of “Santa Claus Go Straight to the...
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Richard Rorty, 1931-2007
Telos reports the death of Richard Rorty last Friday. I got engaged with Rorty’s ideas when I was the philosophy editor at Amazon.com and reviewed books like Achieving Our Country; I still consider his...
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Remembering Andy Jones
I was saddened to hear this afternoon about the death of entertainment journalist Andy Jones, who suffered a fatal heart attack at a press screening of the new Angelina Jolie film A Mighty Heart. I...
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Donald E. Westlake, 1933-2008
I was saddened yesterday to hear of the death of mystery writer Donald E. Westlake. Under his own name as well as the pseudonym “Richard Stark,” Westlake wrote some of my favorite comic caper and...
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Howard Zinn, 1922-2010
It was just a little over a month ago that I encouraged you to watch The People Speak, a series of performances based on historical documents that had been collected by Howard Zinn in Voices of a...
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Joe Kubert, 1926-2012
DC Comics I was saddened yesterday afternoon to hear about the death of the comic book artist Joe Kubert. Although I came of age about a decade too late to be reading Kubert’s work when it came out, I...
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