Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld has passed away; see, for example, Joseph Berger's obituary in The New York Times.
He was certainly one of the greatest Holocaust -- in its broadest sense -- authors; two of his titles are under review at the complete review:
A Last Conversation with Aharon Appelfeld, David Samuels' Q & A with the author, at Tablet.
-As William Grimes writes in The New York Times, Fred Bass, Who Made the Strand Bookstore a Mecca, Dies at 89.
The Strand, as shaped by Fred Bass, is the bookstore
The Strand, as shaped by Fred Bass, is the bookstore
How to Shop at the Strand (or any good bookstore) with Michael Orthofer & Tyler Cowen .....)
“H.P. Lovecraft, Author, Is Dead”
Milt Rosenberg, RIP
As academic and social critic Joseph Epstein correctly puts it in
The Weekly Standard, "Five nights a week, Sunday through Thursday, from
1973 to 2012, Milton
Rosenberg elevated AM radio and the cultural tone generally in
Chicago. Milt Rosenberg died on January 9 at the age of 92. His two-hour talk
show was nothing if not anomalous. A University of Chicago professor, his academic
specialty was social psychology, though it seems strange to use the word
'specialty' in connection with Milt Rosenberg, who may have been the
world’s greatest paid dilettante."
"Dilettante need not be a pejorative word. In its archaic
sense, it meant someone with an amateur interest in many things, and amateur,
in its root sense, means a lover. Milt Rosenberg qualified on both grounds. As
Terence said 'Nothing human is alien to me,' Milt might have said that
nothing intellectual was without interest to him. He seemed to know a fair
amount about everything. During any given week he might have on his show Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,
Milton Friedman,
a film actor, an astrophysicist, and a Chicago machine politician — and he
would keep the conversation humming along nicely with all of them."
Yup, if I only had a buck for every appearance of my own during
the 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. slot for a show called "Extension 720"! He
was an at times cranky anomaly. The New York City native mixed in French
aphorisms and alluded to dead German philosophers. It was a show made for FM,
or now a podcast, but was a fixture on a powerhouse AM station that for decades
was associated with lively morning drive hosts and broadcasts of the
Cubs. And you'd shlep downtown for a 9 p.m. radio show because, well,
it was Milt. And those listening were a smart and engaged slice of the
Heartland.
The programming tides
change and he seemed a bit like Mariano
Rivera, the great Yankees relief pitcher allowed to still
wear No. 42 after baseball had retired Jackie Robinson's
number. When his show was gone after a nearly half-century run, a richly
idiosyncratic slice of radio vanished. Rest in peace, Milt.“H.P. Lovecraft, Author, Is Dead”
