madrobins: It's a meatloaf.  Dressed up like a bunny.  (Default)
madrobins ([personal profile] madrobins) wrote2007-12-30 04:22 pm

In Passing

Every year the last New York Times Magazine of the year is the "Lives They Lived" edition. I love this, because, while they note the Great and Notorious in passing, many, if not all of the lives they mention are people I hadn't heard of, or whose importance I hadn't realized. This year's edition is no exception. Along with Liz Claiborne, Charles Nelson Reilly and Brett Somers, Thomas Eagleton, and David Halberstam, there are pieces on Madeleine Stern, whom I knew only as the editor of Louisa Alcott's blood-and-thunder magazine stories; on Jimmy Connors' mother Gloria, who brought her son up a tennis player from the cradle; on Mary Crisp, a Republican I think I would have been proud to know; and Andrée de Jongh, who smuggled Allied soldiers out of Nazi-occupied Belgium.

The result of this issue of the Magazine is, always, to make me wish I had known more about these people while they were alive. Failing that, I like that they are remembered here, in this way. Go look. You might be edified.

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