Joe Kubert: an unparalleled life

Although it really wasn’t logical to think that Joe Kubert would live forever, I think we can all be forgiven for thinking it might
just happen. So his death yesterday at age 85 comes as a real blow. With one of the longest, most productive careers in American comics, he was a pillar of such energy and strength that as dynamic as his art was, the man himself seemed to surpass it. Kubert’s start in comics sounds like something out of the annals of the child welfare agency now: as a mere boy of  12 or so, he hung around the studios of the burgeoning comics industry of the late 30s—not exactly the most savory place for a kid, perhaps, but he loved to draw, and his family encouraged that interest. It was at MLJ Studios (the precursor to Archie) that Kubert recalled getting his his first job, helping ink a Bob Montana story while he was just a young teen. (The exact details of Kubert’s first comics job don’t seem to have ever been established, such being the drifting memories of a man with a long life behind him.) Although he did go to high school—the High School of Music and Art—by the time he graduated he was already working with several publishers, and coloring reprint of Eisner’s Spirit. Harvey, EC, Fiction House — Kubert worked for them all, creating the prehistoric warrior Tor, for St. Allen and becoming the seminal Hawkman artist for the Silver Age DC.

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Gore Vidal, 1925-2012

Franco Origlia/Getty Images for The New York Times
Gore Vidal in 2004.

Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer

By CHARLES McGRATH

Gore Vidal, the elegant, acerbic all-around man of letters who presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilization, died on Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, where he moved in 2003, after years of living in Ravello, Italy. He was 86.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers said by telephone.

Mr. Vidal was, at the end of his life, an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent. He published some 25 novels, two memoirs and several volumes of stylish, magisterial essays. He also wrote plays, television dramas and screenplays. For a while he was even a contract writer at MGM. And he could always be counted on for a spur-of-the-moment aphorism, putdown or sharply worded critique of American foreign policy.

Perhaps more than any other American writer except Norman Mailer or Truman Capote, Mr. Vidal took great pleasure in being a public figure. He twice ran for office — in 1960, when he was the Democratic Congressional candidate for the 29th District in upstate New York, and in 1982, when he campaigned in California for a seat in the Senate — and though he lost both times, he often conducted himself as a sort of unelected shadow president. He once said, “There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

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Author Maeve Binchy dies aged 72

Binchy had sold more than 40 million books worldwide

Best-selling Irish author Maeve Binchy has died aged 72 after a short illness.

Binchy, born in Dalkey, Co Dublin, has sold more than 40 million books. Her works were often set in Ireland and have been translated into 37 languages.

They include The Lilac Bus as well as Tara Road and Circle of Friends, which were both adapted for screen.

Binchy trained as a teacher before moving into journalism and writing, publishing her first novel – Light a Penny Candle – in 1982.

She had written the novel in her spare time from her day job as a journalist at The Irish Times.

Fellow novelist Jilly Cooper paid tribute, saying Binchy was “a natural storyteller”.

“She was a darling – I’m very, very sad,” she told Radio 4′s Today programme.

“She was so kind and funny and captivating, and was a brilliant writer.”

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Stephen Covey, author of ’7 Habbits of Highly Effective People’, dead at 79

Photo credit: AP | This Feb. 25, 2003 file photo shows Dr. Stephen R. Covey at a training session at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Covey, the motivational speaker best known for the book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” died July 16, 2012, in Idaho, three months after a serious bicycle accident in Utah. He was 79.

Stephen R. Covey, author of the bestselling motivational book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” died on Monday at an Idaho hospital from injuries he suffered in a bicycle accident in April, family members said in a statement. He was 79.

Covey, a former professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, founded an executive training center in Salt Lake City that merged in 1997 with Franklin Quest Co to form FranklinCovey, a leading provider of time-management seminars and publications.

The publicly traded company is perhaps best known for its line of Franklin Planner appointment calendars, which it markets along with books, workshops and other products based on its “Franklin System” of business management and Covey’s “7 Habits” principles.

Covey, a Salt Lake City native, earned a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard University and a doctorate from Brigham Young.

But it was his self-help guide to success in business, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change,” published in 1989, that made Covey a brand name.

He went on to write several more bestsellers about business management, including ”Principle-Centered Leadership,” became a favorite motivational speaker on the Fortune 100 circuit and served as a personal consultant to organizations ranging from Procter & Gamble to NASA.

Covey was recognized in 1996 as one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential Americans, and was named among the world’s top 50 business thinkers in 2011 by Thinkers50, a group that compiles that list every other year.

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Gitta Sereny dies at 91

Gitta Sereny in 1998: the relationships she built with her subjects were often controversial but her books were acclaimed for their psychological insights. Photograph: Frank Martin for the Observer

Journalist was known for her unflinching studies of Nazis and child criminals, including Albert Speer and Mary Bell.

By Barry Neild

Gitta Sereny, the veteran journalist whose unflinching studies of some of modern history’s most reviled figures attempted to make sense of their crimes, has died. She was 91.

Sereny attracted praise and criticism for her profiles of senior Nazis and child murderers but was universally acknowledged as among the most tenacious interrogators of her generation.

“She was an enormously spirited person, extraordinarily brave and very, very determined,” said Stuart Proffitt, her publisher at Penguin Press.

“She wasn’t afraid to ask questions that took her to places other people didn’t want to go, and wasn’t afraid either if the answers were unfashionable or shocking. In the two main areas of her interest – Nazi Germany and the lives of children in extreme situations – she was able to go further than almost everyone else in her psychological penetration.”

Sereny’s in-depth explorations included studies of the Nazi architect Albert Speer and the boys convicted for the murder of James Bulger. Her relationships with her subjects, built up over scores of hours of interviews, often proved controversial. She was criticised for her decision to pay the child killer Mary Bell for her co-operation in producing a book about her crimes, and faced accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser after publication of her work on Speer.

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Barry Unsworth, Booker prizewinner, dies at 81

British author Barry Unsworth has died in Italy aged 81

Writer of historical fiction, who won Britain’s highest literary honour in 1992 for Sacred Hunger, has died.

By Alison Flood

British novelist Barry Unsworth, who won the Booker prize for his story about the 18th-century slave trade, Sacred Hunger, has died in Italy aged 81.

The Durham-born author had lived in Umbria for many years. His publisher Hutchinson confirmed the news of his death this morning.

“Barry was a wonderful writer and this is a great loss,” said publishing director Jocasta Hamilton. “Barry’s work was characterised by a willingness to tackle big subjects with great humanity. His writing brought enormous pleasure as well as being thought-provoking and illuminating. We are incredibly proud to have had the opportunity to publish his last novel, The Quality of Mercy, which has been shortlisted for the Walter Scott prize. Many of us met him in 2010 and were as charmed in person as we had been thrilled by his novels.”

From Morality Play, a 14th-century murder mystery, to Pascali’s Island, set during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, many of Unsworth’s 17 acclaimed novels explored different aspects of history.

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Ray Bradbury dies: Science fiction author of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ and ‘Martian Chronicles’ was 91

  By Becky Krystal

Ray Bradbury, a boundlessly imaginative novelist who wrote some of the most popular science fiction books of all time, including “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles,” and who transformed the genre of flying saucers and little green men into a medium exploring childhood terrors, colonialism and the erosion of individual thought, died June 5. He was 91.

The death was announced by the Associated Press.

Mr. Bradbury, who began his career in the 1930s contributing stories to pulp-fiction magazines, received a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 2007 “for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.”

His body of work, which continued to appear through recent years to terrific reviews, encompassed more than 500 titles, including novels, plays (“Dandelion Wine,” adapted from his 1957 semi-autobiographical novel), children’s books and short stories. His tales were often adapted for film, including the futuristic story of a book-burning society (director François Truffaut’s “Fahrenheit 451,” in 1966), a suspense story about childhood fears (“Something Wicked This Way Comes” in 1983) and the more straightforward alien attack story (“It Came From Outer Space” in 1953).

 

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Mike McGrady, Known for a Literary Hoax, Dies at 78

Associated Press
Mike McGrady in 1969.

By MARGALIT FOX

Mike McGrady, a prizewinning reporter for Newsday who to his chagrin was best known as the mastermind of one of the juiciest literary hoaxes in America — the best-selling collaborative novel “Naked Came the Stranger,” whose publication in 1969 made “Peyton Place” look like a church picnic — died on Sunday in Shelton, Wash. He was 78 and lived in Lilliwaup, Wash.

The cause was pneumonia, said Harvey Aronson, who with Mr. McGrady was a co-editor of the novel, written by 25 Newsday journalists in an era when newsrooms were arguably more relaxed and inarguably more bibulous.

Intended to be a work of no redeeming social value and even less literary value, “Naked Came the Stranger” by all appearances succeeded estimably on both counts.

Originally issued by Lyle Stuart, an independent publisher known for subversive titles, the novel was a no-holds-barred chronicle of a suburban woman’s sexual liaisons, with each chapter recounting a different escapade:

She has sex with a mobster and sex with a rabbi. She has sex with a hippie and sex with at least one accountant. There is a scene involving a tollbooth, another involving ice cubes and still another featuring a Shetland pony.

The book’s cover — a nude woman seen from behind — left little to the imagination, as, in its way, did its prose:

“Ernie found what Cervantes and Milton had only sought. He thought the fillings in his teeth would melt.”

The purported author was Penelope Ashe, who as the jacket copy told it was a “demure Long Island housewife.” In reality, Mr. McGrady had dreamed up the book as ironic commentary on the public’s appetite for Jacqueline Susann and her ilk.

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Mexican author Carlos Fuentes dead at 83

Fuentes’ works gave an insight into Mexican identity

The Mexican author Carlos Fuentes has died, aged 83.

Fuentes was one of the most prolific Latin American writers known equally for his fiction and his essays on politics and culture.

His most famous works were The Death of Artemio Cruz and The Old Gringo.

He was associated with the Latin American Boom – a literary movement made up of mainly young authors whose politically critical works broke with established traditions.

He died in a hospital in Mexico City. Hospital sources did not comment on his cause of death.

Mr Fuentes wrote a wealth of novels, plays and essays and regularly commented on political events in Spanish newspaper El Pais.

Born in Panama in 1928, he did not move to Mexico until he was 16.

The son of a diplomat, Mr Fuentes spent much of his childhood moving around the Western Hemisphere.

He said it was this which allowed him to view Latin America from a distance, giving him a critical edge.

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Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83

Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times
Maurice Sendak at his Ridgefield, Conn., home with his German Shepherd, Herman, in 2006

  By MARGALIT FOX

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83 and lived in Ridgefield, Conn.

The cause was complications from a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963.

Among the other titles he wrote and illustrated, all from Harper & Row, are “In the Night Kitchen” (1970) and “Outside Over There” (1981), which together with “Where the Wild Things Are” form a trilogy; “The Sign on Rosie’s Door” (1960); “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” (1967); and “The Nutshell Library” (1962), a boxed set of four tiny volumes comprising “Alligators All Around,” “Chicken Soup With Rice,” “One Was Johnny” and “Pierre.”

In September, a new picture book by Mr. Sendak, “Bumble-Ardy” — the first in 30 years for which he produced both text and illustrations — was issued by HarperCollins Publishers. The book, which spent five weeks on the New York Times children’s best-seller list, tells the not-altogether-lighthearted story of an orphaned pig (his parents are eaten) who gives himself a riotous birthday party.

A posthumous picture book, “My Brother’s Book” — a poem written and illustrated by Mr. Sendak and inspired by his love for his late brother, Jack — is scheduled to be published next February.

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