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 ( Read more... )

Gore Vidal died on Tuesday, 31 July at the age of 86 due complications from pneumonia; the Internet pretty much blossomed on Wednesday, 1 August, with remembrances and "good riddances", which trickled to a stop by Friday, 3 August (or, in some quarters, Sunday, 5 August ( Read more... )

Dwight Garner had a nice overview of tough-guy Southern novelist Harry Crews in yesterday's (Thursday, 29 March) "ArtsBeat" blog on the New York Times's website ("Reading Crews, a Novelist as Swaggering as His Characters"); Crews passed away on Wednesday, 28 March, at the age of 76.

(SIDEBAR: the NY Times will restrict non-subscribers to ten ( Read more... )

Yesterday, the first thing that leaped out at me from the Google News feed on my computer at work was the hardly unexpected, but no less devastating, word of the passing, on Thursday night (15 December) of British-American professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens (journalist, essayist, book critic, public intellectual, public gadfly), from ( Read more... )

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Jack Williamson, who was the second Grand Master anointed by the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFoA: they're the folks who hand out the Nebula Awards), died in his home in Portales, New Mexico last Friday, 10 November. He was 98 years old, and still taught an English class (apparently one specializing in science fiction) at Eastern New ( Read more... )

Re-watched The Godfather for the umpteenth time last night/this morning (I missed the midnight showing of it that a local art-house movie theatre put on earlier this summer, framdammit); afterwards, I poked around on the Web to try to chase down the filmographies and, uh, "telly-ographies" of some of the mugs who appeared in it, which is when I ( Read more... )

How in the hell did I miss hearing that Evan Hunter -- whose most famous nom de plume was Ed McBain -- died on 6 July?!

His 87th Precinct series -- in which he basically invented the oh-so-popular "police procedural" genre -- can usually be counted on for solid entertainment; I'm nowhere near close to reading all of them, but that can perhaps be ( Read more... )

Heard on Tuesday, 26 July that Edward Bunker, the ex-convict turned successful novelist, screenwriter, and sometime actor (Straight Time, Runaway Train, Tango & Cash, Reservoir Dogs), passed away on Tuesday, 19 July, at the age of 71.

On NPR's Fresh Air rebroadcast (on Wednesday, 27 July) of the interview that Terry Gross conducted with Bunker ( Read more... )

Heard on the first hour of NPR's All Things Considered today that James Doohan, the actor "who faked a Scottish burr to create one of television's most endearing characters, Chief Engineer Montgomery (Scotty) Scott of the U.S.S. Enterprise," to cite the obituary written by John Schwartz in today's New York Times, died today (Wednesday, 20 July) at ( Read more... )