RIP round-up.
First we had Gore Vidal's not-unexpected passing last Tuesday, 31 July.
Then we learned of the death, on Thursday, 2 August, of Sir John Keegan, certainly one of, if not the, preeminent military historians of the late 20th century, and one noted for the attention that he paid to the psychological effects of war upon men in works such as 1976's The Face of Battle and 1987's The Mask of Command. (Yesterday NPR's Fresh Air broadcast a ten minute excerpt from the interview that show host Terry Gross had with Keegan, and which originally aired on 30 July 1998.)
Then we were struck by news of the death of Robert Hughes, a fiercely opinionated bon vivant who was hailed as the greatest art critic of the late 20th century and also a popular historian, early in the morning on Tuesday, 7 August. While Hughes, along with his friend and fellow Ozzie Clive James, can in some sense be said to have set English criticism on its collective ear from the 1960s onward, he was regarded at times in his native Australia as a "traitor" -- perhaps most especially for his wonderful opus The Fatal Shore, a history of the country's beginnings as Britain's penal colony. (The New York Review of Books' review, in its 22 December 2011 issue, of Hughes' last book, Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History, has me champing at the bit to purchase and read it.)
And then we learned of the death of movie critic Judith Crist at the age of 90 on Tuesday, 7 August; I haven't read very much of her criticism -- I was more of a wanna-be "Paulette," I'm afraid -- but anyone who prompted director Billy Wilder to liken her to the Boston Strangler and director Otto Preminger to refer to her as "Judas Crist" can't be all bad.
Oh, yeah: Oscar-winning (The Way We Were; The Sting) and Tony- and Pulitzer-winning (A Chorus Line) composer Marvin Hamlisch died on Monday, 6 August, at the age of 68. He also co-wrote "Nobody Does it Better" for the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me and "Through the Eyes of Love" for the tween- and teenage girl-friendly romance movie Ice Castles. He also scored a couple of early Woody Allen comedies (Take the Money and Run, Bananas), Sophie's Choice (which contains my favorite early career performance by Meryl Streep; Kevin Kline's pretty good too), and Same Time, Next Year -- the last of which kicked me in my mopey adolescent emotional sac, notwithstanding Pauline Kael's acerbic takedown of it (which I didn't read until years after I'd revolted my father by sniffling at it).
Man: it never rains but what it pours, eh?
Then we learned of the death, on Thursday, 2 August, of Sir John Keegan, certainly one of, if not the, preeminent military historians of the late 20th century, and one noted for the attention that he paid to the psychological effects of war upon men in works such as 1976's The Face of Battle and 1987's The Mask of Command. (Yesterday NPR's Fresh Air broadcast a ten minute excerpt from the interview that show host Terry Gross had with Keegan, and which originally aired on 30 July 1998.)
Then we were struck by news of the death of Robert Hughes, a fiercely opinionated bon vivant who was hailed as the greatest art critic of the late 20th century and also a popular historian, early in the morning on Tuesday, 7 August. While Hughes, along with his friend and fellow Ozzie Clive James, can in some sense be said to have set English criticism on its collective ear from the 1960s onward, he was regarded at times in his native Australia as a "traitor" -- perhaps most especially for his wonderful opus The Fatal Shore, a history of the country's beginnings as Britain's penal colony. (The New York Review of Books' review, in its 22 December 2011 issue, of Hughes' last book, Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History, has me champing at the bit to purchase and read it.)
And then we learned of the death of movie critic Judith Crist at the age of 90 on Tuesday, 7 August; I haven't read very much of her criticism -- I was more of a wanna-be "Paulette," I'm afraid -- but anyone who prompted director Billy Wilder to liken her to the Boston Strangler and director Otto Preminger to refer to her as "Judas Crist" can't be all bad.
Oh, yeah: Oscar-winning (The Way We Were; The Sting) and Tony- and Pulitzer-winning (A Chorus Line) composer Marvin Hamlisch died on Monday, 6 August, at the age of 68. He also co-wrote "Nobody Does it Better" for the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me and "Through the Eyes of Love" for the tween- and teenage girl-friendly romance movie Ice Castles. He also scored a couple of early Woody Allen comedies (Take the Money and Run, Bananas), Sophie's Choice (which contains my favorite early career performance by Meryl Streep; Kevin Kline's pretty good too), and Same Time, Next Year -- the last of which kicked me in my mopey adolescent emotional sac, notwithstanding Pauline Kael's acerbic takedown of it (which I didn't read until years after I'd revolted my father by sniffling at it).
Man: it never rains but what it pours, eh?