Today’s kind of a run-down of people who aren’t as famous as I usually cover, but whose obits I find interesting in one way or another.
Dee Hock. He’s generally credited with having built the consortium that became Visa into what it is today.
Melissa Bank. The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing was a big deal (I never read it). Her follow-up book seems to have been well regarded, but didn’t do as well, and she was working on a third book when she died at 61.
Mary Ellin Barrett. She was one of Irving Berlin’s daughters, and wrote a book about her father (Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir).
In it, Ms. Barrett offered a new portrait of her father: droll, self-effacing, with an unspoken perfectionism that would doom him to bitterness in old age but that for four decades of maturity pushed him to dazzling artistic achievements, along with attentiveness to his family.
That has become a definitive insider’s view of Irving Berlin. The Times critic Stephen Holden credited Ms. Barrett with the ability to balance affection for her father with awareness of his flaws, and he called her book a “touching, wise, gracefully written memoir.”
Albert Woodfox, who spent 42 years in solitary at Angola.
Mr. Woodfox was placed in solitary confinement in 1972 after being accused of murdering Brent Miller, a 23-year-old corrections officer. A tangled legal ordeal ensued, including two convictions, both overturned, and three indictments stretching over four decades.
The case struck most commentators as problematic. No forensic evidence linked Mr. Woodfox to the crime, so the authorities’ argument depended on witnesses, who over time were discredited or proved unreliable.
Sid Jacobson, comics writer.
An interesting batch of obits today. The one most intriguing is that of Irving Berlin’s daughter, Ms. Barrett. To be able to both tell about her relationship with her father, and the intimacies between them, and still remain objective about him, and his own failings, as a human being, is perhaps the best book review that anyone could ever get. And it speaks a lot about her as both an author and a person.
I might attempt to find a copy of the book, perhaps from my library, or get it sent to them, and read it. Unless I find it in my online resources and read in there. I cannot afford to purchase all of the books that I want to read, so I try to get them free. They tend to be worth the time spent finding them. I also go back to the classics that everyone read in school, but that I did not, and read them. Like Last of the Mohicans, or Moby Dick, etc. I never had to read them, so I spent my time reading things like Medical Block Buchenwald, or Instant Replay, by Jerry Kramer, of the Green Bay Packers, Ernie Pyle’s work from WWII, Guadal Canal Diaries, etc. Things that were factual and historical.
But I have enjoyed reading some of the classics. I often have 2 or 3 books that I am reading at the same time. I never used to be able to do that, but now that I read them on my computer, it is easy. Have a great weekend.