For information on the death metal band, see Obituary (band).

An obituary is a notice of the death of a person, usually published in a newspaper, written or commissioned by the newspaper, and usually including a short biography. It is similar to a funeral notice, which is also published on the obituary page. A funeral notice is a paid advertisement written by family members, placed in the newspaper by the funeral home.

Writing obituaries

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Because of the short time between the notification of a death and the next publication deadline, most newspapers have one or more clerks who specialize in typing such things as obituaries. Sometimes, this task is given to a cub reporter (often to allow an editor to evaluate writing and copyreading skills), although today many obituary clerks also have other duties (such as typing news releases and social news).

More on [ Obituary ]

The Economist: Obituary

Yegor Gaidar
Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:02:55 -0000
Yegor Timurovich Gaidar, a Russian reformer, died on December 16th, aged 53“IN RUSSIA you have to live long,” a Russian poet said once. Yegor Gaidar did not. But in his short life he did not just see historic changes, he brought them about. Journalists liked to call him the architect of Russian market reforms. As justifiably, he could be called the man who saved his country from civil war. In the autumn of 1991, at the age of 35, he had to deal with the collapse of the Soviet economy and the disintegration of a nuclear empire into 15 states. Boris Yeltsin asked him to serve first as deputy prime minister, then as finance minister and then as acting head of government. Mr Gaidar was an economics graduate from Moscow State University and economics editor of an academic journal, the Communist. With his big shiny forehead and podgy face, he looked like the class swot, rather than a revolutionary. Yet his impact was no less significant: he helped to avert another revolution of the violent Bolshevik kind. Unusually, Mr Gaidar had both an academic’s close eye for facts and figures, and a sense of the weight of his own decisions in the turbulent sweep of Russian history. ...
Charis Wilson
Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:59:10 -0000
Charis Wilson, model and writer, died on November 20th, aged 95THE first time she modelled for Edward Weston, in March 1934, Charis Wilson knew she didn’t look good. At 20 she was “a piece of jailbait”, a mere child, especially with the stumpy plaits into which she sometimes twisted her hair. She was a drifter, moving in a miasma of angry despair in and out of speakeasies and other people’s beds because her father had refused to let her go to college, even though she’d won a full scholarship to Sarah Lawrence, and even though he would certainly have let her brother go. There was nothing to do but work in her mother’s dress shop, sleep around in San Francisco, get pregnant, have an abortion. She had taken a solemn vow of chastity since then, like one of her made-up childhood rituals of lying in freezing cold water, but to someone with her natural generosity it was a heartless, bitter thing. She looked pale, her chin jutting out in defiance and her whole face needing something—like warts on her nose, her mother told her—to make it remotely interesting. But none of this seemed to matter to the short, long-faced, middle-aged man who was now behind the focusing cloth, clattering the shutter furiously in tenth-of-a-second bursts, to take her picture. It was obvious to her as soon as they had met, some weeks before—Weston’s eyes meeting hers across the crowd at a concert, looking away, looking back again—that he missed nothing. His career as one of America’s greatest photographers was already taking shape. He was busy now recording separate fragments of her, a knee, a shin, a shoulder, her arms. But in the repeated curve of her thigh and calf he saw shapes like sea shells, with the luminescence and faint muscular rays of the great chambered nautilus. Her torso, outlined in light, was like the trunk of a cypress tree just entering the soil. Her skin, every follicle and flaw in focus in the ground glass of his lens, had the same sun- and sea-wind weathering, but fainter, of the stones of the Californian desert, and her hips had the convolutions of the naked mountains. To him she was a landscape. ...
Samak Sundaravej
Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:55:30 -0000
Samak Sundaravej, celebrity chef and prime minister of Thailand, died on November 24th, aged 74 THAILAND’S recent political history has been, to put it mildly, volatile. In 1997 a democratic constitution supposedly ended several decades of flirting with generals. Four years later Thaksin Shinawatra, a corrupt but competent telecoms tycoon, was elected. In 2006 he was forced out in a bloodless army coup, and skipped the country. The next year a new election brought in the burly, boisterous figure of Samak Sundaravej. Mr Samak, once Mr Thaksin’s sworn enemy, was now an opportunistic proxy for him. A cartoon of the time showed him as a fat puppet dragon—or possibly a cat, since he was a famous felinophile—with Mr Thaksin pulling the strings. But the thing to notice was the dragon’s long forked tongue. A dangerous beast, this. ...
Earl Cooley
Thu, 26 Nov 2009 11:40:33 -0000
Earl Cooley, smokejumper, died on November 9th, aged 98SEEN from the height of a passenger jet, the mountains of Idaho and western Montana look like the grey, wrinkled hide of a dinosaur. Closer up, from a twin-engine aircraft, those wrinkles become thousands of conifers marching over the steep and broken ground. Closer still—“My God! My chute’s not opening! Something’s wrong!”—that’s a spruce you’re plunging into, your tardy parachute lines tangling round your neck and your flailing legs kicking off branches a hundred feet above the ground. Luckily, you’re alive. Luckier still, you have a rope in your trouser pocket that lets you rappel down from the tree. And you haven’t even got to the fire yet. Such was Earl Cooley’s introduction, on July 12th 1940 when he was 28, to the completely new science of smokejumping. After years spent trying to douse the forest fires of America’s West from aircraft—labouring skywards with water stowed in five-gallon cans and beer barrels—this was the first attempt to parachute firefighters to blazes too remote to reach by road. In the 22 years Mr Cooley was to spend doing it, it was also his closest call. He reflected later that if the spruce had not saved him, the smokejumping programme itself would not have survived—let alone become the success it is today, with 1,432 jumps made for the Forest Service last year. Back then, too many people thought it crazy. One Montana regional forester, a big-shot called Evan Kelly, had already complained to Washington that it was a waste of “honest suppression money”—dollars spent putting out fires in the old, plodding, non-flamboyant way. ...
Robert Rines
Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:39:48 -0000
Robert Rines, scientist and Nessie-hunter, died on November 1st, aged 87EYEWITNESS evidence may be all very well in a court of law, but it cuts no ice with scientists. Robert Rines knew that perfectly, because he was a scientist himself, and a good one. In his work to develop radar, sonar and ultrasound he performed all the necessary tests and provided all the proofs required. But when a shining grey hump appeared from the waters of Loch Ness, bringing a hectic lump to his throat and causing him to run across the road, jamming first a telescope and then binoculars to his eyes, he was simply a man who knew he had seen a monster. Science trailed uncomfortably behind. What he saw on that day in June 1972 he described as well as he could. It was a hump about 25 feet (8 metres) long, covered with rough dark-grey hide like an elephant’s back. The creature it belonged to ploughed against the current for a while, and then disappeared. It had presumably returned to its haunts in the murky, peaty depths of the lake. But Mr Rines’s life was upside down. The star lecturer in innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the founder and president of the Academy of Applied Science, now had a myth on his hands. He determined to substantiate it with all the cash he could raise and all the expertise he could muster, because the alternative was ridicule, or worse. Galileo sometimes sprang to mind. ...
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:03:39 -0000
Claude Levi-Strauss, anthropologist, died on October 30th, aged 100BEFORE Claude Levi-Strauss revolutionised the discipline, anthropology in France, and generally elsewhere, was a matter of ill-attended lectures in small, cold halls, and the collection of feathers and fish-hooks as evidence of the quaint divergences of the “primitive” tribes of mankind. He made it as fashionable as philosophy and poetry, both of which he wove through his ethnographical studies as perhaps only French intellectuals can. The proper study of mankind was indeed man: not in his politicking, warring or banking, but naked, painting his body, hunting bears, snaring birds. Here lay the universal truths about how the human mind worked and what man was. Obedient to Rousseau, who always “set him aflame”, Mr Levi-Strauss observed men from afar. He never got too near or stayed too long in his rare stints of field-work, mostly in Brazil in the 1930s; he grasped only a few words of the languages, and avoided the “hateful” distractions of individual characters. In the bitter phrase of Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom he sparred for years, he preferred to view men like ants. He focused not on their differences but on the deep-lying patterns and systems in everything they did, until he could proclaim that all tribal myths were reducible to one formula, and that all human thought, “savage” or not, was built up from binary opposites such as hot and cold, night and day, raw and cooked, good and bad. Round these concepts whole societies, as well as stories, were organised. ...

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