Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Lamont Bentley, a promising actor who appeared in more than a dozen films and television shows but was best known for his role on the comedy series “Moesha,” died early Wednesday in a car crash in Ventura County. He was 31.

Bentley was traveling alone on the 118 Freeway near Simi Valley shortly after midnight when he headed for the Rocky Peak Fire Road offramp at a high speed, witnesses told authorities. His Mercedes-Benz ran through a stop sign, tore through a chain-link fence across the street, and rolled down an embankment, where he was thrown from the car into freeway traffic.

Bentley was hit by up to five cars before authorities reached him, said Craig Stevens, a senior deputy medical examiner for Ventura County.

LA Times
Michael Sturdevant, 60, the leader of a 1975 Menominee Indian takeover of a monastery near Gresham, Wis., died of cancer Jan. 10 in Madison, Wis.

Sturdevant drew national attention when he and about 45 members of the tribe took over the abandoned 84-room Alexian Brothers Novitiate on New Year’s Day 1975.

Their goal was to turn the former mansion into an American Indian hospital.

NY Times
Marshall Edelson, a Yale psychiatrist and author who received national attention in his field for his advocacy of scientific rigor in psychoanalysis, died on Sunday at his home in Woodbridge, Conn. He was 76.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his family said.

Dr. Edelson wrote extensively in subjects as diverse as linguistics, sociology and sociotherapy. He was probably best known for his 1988 book, “Psychoanalysis: A Theory in Crisis.” In that work, he defended psychoanalysis from critics who contended that the field had often lacked scientific discipline when examining its own research. Dr. Edelson argued that, with proper care, data from psychoanalytic sessions could be recorded and applied rigorously to test rival theories.
Sociotherapy and psychotherapy (Austen Riggs Center monograph series)
The practice of sociotherapy: A case study
Psychoanalysis: A theory in crisis
The idea of a mental illness
The termination of intensive psychotherapy (American lecture series, publication)

NY Times
Malcolm Brachman, a Texas businessman and onetime nuclear physicist who was among the first bridge enthusiasts to finance his own team, died on Jan. 11 at his daughter’s home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 78 and until recently a Dallas resident.

The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, said Lisa Brachman, his daughter.

A wealthy oil and insurance executive, Mr. Brachman would hire and underwrite six-member teams that included bridge professionals like Paul Soloway and Eddie Kantar. As captain, he led his players in winning eight national team championships, including the Reisinger Board-A-Match as recently as 2003.

In 1979, his squad won both the Vanderbilt and Spingold, which are also national titles, and defeated Italy in the Bermuda Bowl, the world’s leading team competition.

“He was the first, shall we say, sponsor to win a world championship, and I think he opened people’s eyes to the possibility,” said Mike Passell, Mr. Brachman’s longtime bridge partner. “It’s like George Steinbrenner getting to play on the Yankees.”

NY Times
Walter B. Wriston, the former chairman of Citicorp who became the most influential banker of his generation by making his bank into the world’s largest through a barrage of innovations, including the automated teller machine, died on Wednesday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. He was 85.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his brother-in-law, Robert Dineen, said.

When he started at what was then First National City Bank in 1946, Mr. Wriston sat at a roll-top desk waiting for customers and feared that he would be bored to death by the stodgy banking world.

By the time he retired in 1984, he had dazzled the industry through aggressive international expansion, computerization and diversification that seemed dizzying except when compared with the changes that followed.
The Twilight of Sovereignty : How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World
The Twilight of Sovereignty
Risk and Other Four Letter Words
The whale oil, chicken and energy syndrome: An address
Liberty, leadership and license
More books at Amazon.com

NY Times
H. Bentley Glass, a biologist who in the 1950’s and 60’s led a ubiquitous career as writer, scientific policy maker and theorizer, with provocative and often prescient predictions about still-burning issues like genetics and nuclear war, died on Sunday in Boulder, Colo.

His daughter, Lois Edgar, said his death one day before he would have been 99 was in line with his prediction in 1967 that people in 2000 would live to nearly 100.

Dr. Glass refused to stay within the bounds of academia and found time while writing and editing several books and more than 400 scientific articles to write a science column in The Baltimore Evening Sun. He spoke out widely on issues like the ethics of test-tube babies, the dangers of radioactivity and the genetic nature of race.
More books at Amazon.com
Genes and the man, (The Science in modern living series; basic science material for use in modern education)
Science and Ethical Values:

NY Times
Arthur Walworth, a writer on American diplomatic history and an author of a Pulitzer-Prize winning life of Woodrow Wilson, died on Jan. 10 in Needham, Mass. A native and longtime resident of Newton, Mass., he was 101.

His death was announced by Charles E. Holly, a partner in the Boston law firm Weston, Patrick, Willard & Redding.

Mr. Walworth began his study of Wilson at the advice of Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. of Harvard. Searching for new sources, he spent 10 years scouring private papers, the official interpreter’s diary, the confidential stenographer’s personal notes and the like. He also gained access to previously unavailable materials at Yale and elsewhere, including the papers and unopened diary of Col. E. M. House, Wilson’s confidant.
Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919
America’s moment, 1918: American diplomacy at the end of World War I
Woodrow Wilson: American Prophet
Black ships off Japan;: The story of Commodore Perry’s expedition,
Cape Breton, isle of romance
The Medomak way: The story of the first fifty years of an American summer camp for boys

NY Times
Alebachew Teka, a comedian and talk-show host who was a television star in Ethiopia, died on Sunday when his car careered off a road and plunged into a ravine, the police and his friends said. He was 43.

Mr. Alebachew was driving from Addis Ababa to Jimma, 124 miles to the west, to film a documentary when the accident happened. A cameraman also died and another was seriously wounded, the police said.

More than 60,000 mourners attended Mr. Alebachew’s funeral on Monday in Addis Ababa.

Mr. Alebachew rose to prominence during the 1980’s in a satirical television show that was a hit under the military dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam.

LA Times
Muff Singer, a former political activist who became a popular author of books for very young children, died Sunday at her home in the Palms-Mar Vista area of Los Angeles. She was 62.

The cause was ovarian cancer, said her husband, former Los Angeles City Controller Rick Tuttle.

Singer’s first published book, in 1981, was “The Mystery Reader’s Quiz Book,” co-written with Robert A. Wagner and Aneta Corsault. She turned to children’s books in the late 1980s after the birth of her daughter, Sarah.

LA Times
Charlotte MacLeod, mistress of the “cozy” mystery who penned more than 30 whimsical whodunits featuring warm, witty and downright wacky amateur sleuths solving murders by quicklime, ancient spear, stinging bees and other innovative means, has died. She was 82.

MacLeod, who also wrote a dozen juvenile books, myriad short stories and a biography, died Friday at a nursing home in Lewiston, Maine. The author spent most of her life in Boston but had lived in Maine since 1985.

Known for her ladylike manner, hat, white gloves and impeccable grammar, MacLeod was a perfect match for the “cozy” genre — something of the opposite to hard-boiled private eye mysteries. MacLeod’s cozy mysteries eschewed gore, graphic violence, sex and vulgar language and reveled in a dizzy pace, outrageous characters, a little romance and a lot of laughs.
More books at Amazon.com

NY Times
Humphrey Carpenter, the English writer, editor, radio broadcaster and musician who wrote intimate biographies of Auden, Pound, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dennis Potter and Spike Milligan, among others, died on Jan. 4 in Oxford, England. He was 58.

The cause was a pulmonary embolism, Ion Trewin, editor in chief of the publishing house Weidenfeld & Nicolson, said in an article in The Sunday Times of London. Mr. Carpenter had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

A man of boundless and sometimes impish energy, Mr. Carpenter was prolific, his work ranging from conducting radio interviews to producing children’s theater to writing trenchant book reviews to playing a variety of musical instruments. A band he founded in 1983, Vile Bodies, made up of publishers and Oxford dons and specializing in music of the 1920’s and 30’s, performed for years at the Ritz Hotel in London.
More books at Amazon.com

NY Times
Nell Rankin, an American mezzo-soprano who sang at the Metropolitan Opera for 25 years and was highly regarded for her warm-toned portrayals of Amneris in Verdi’s “Aida” and in the title role in Bizet’s “Carmen,” died last Thursday at Cabrini Medical Center in New York. She was 81, and lived in New York.

Her husband, Dr. Hugh Clark Davidson, said the cause was polycythemia vera, a bone marrow disease.

During her years at the Met, Ms. Rankin sang many of the major dramatic mezzo-soprano roles. Among them were Amneris, with which she made her debut on Nov. 22, 1951, and several other Verdi roles - Eboli in “Don Carlo,” Azucena in “Il Trovatore” and Ulrica in “Un Ballo en Maschera,” as well as Carmen, Ortrud in Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” Santuzza in Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” and Herodias in Strauss’s “Salome.” She ended her Met career in 1976, singing Laura in Ponchielli’s “Gioconda.”

NY Times
eter Zeisler, who helped found the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and was for many years executive director of the Theater Communications Group, the national advocacy and service organization for nonprofit theaters, died on Sunday at his home in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. He was 81.

The cause was heart failure, said Lindy Zesch, a friend and former colleague.

Born in New York City, Mr. Zeisler became a stage manager on Broadway at 26. But in the late 1950’s he tired of the commercial and political constraints of Broadway and became convinced that there was an appetite for both classical and contemporary theater elsewhere in the country. After some discussion with Sir Tyrone Guthrie and visits to seven cities, they set their sights on Minneapolis and all but pioneered the regional theater movement at the Guthrie Theater. Founded in 1963 by Mr. Zeisler, Sir Tyrone and Oliver Rea, the Guthrie featured Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy among its actors in its first year.
Minnesota Theatre: From Old Fort Snelling to the Guthrie (Heritage Series)
New Classics from the Guthrie Theater