Category: people

“Playwright Neil Simon, who has been increasingly debilitated by kidney problems in recent years, received a kidney yesterday from his longtime friend and publicist, Bill Evans, in transplant surgery at a New York hospital.”

Wood was one of Canada’s most prominent music teachers. He helped build the Victoria Conservatory of Music. When he and his wife arrived in Victoria in the 1960s, “the tiny school had only 40 students and 12 faculty. Nearly four decades later, the renamed Victoria Conservatory counts more than 2,000 students, 25 staff members and 130 faculty.”

It’s exactly 100 years since Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) was born. “Today Dr. Seuss’s 44 books have been translated into 21 languages, selling more than 500 million copies. ‘We’re even in Braille,’ Ms. Geisel said from her home here, an old observation tower overlooking the Pacific, where her husband did his illustrations. A private man, during his lifetime Geisel never sold his art; he was a pack rat who hoarded everything.”

Canadian painter Toni Onley was killed in a plane crash on the Fraser River in British Columbia over the weekend. He was 76.

JK Rowling has joined the billionaire’s club. “Once an unemployed single mother, she has now sold more than 250 million books around the world. Rowling was ranked at number 552 out of a record number of 587 billionaires in the Forbes list. The writer said last year that the enormous wealth the Harry Potter books have brought her made her feel guilty.”

Daniel Boorstin was Librarian of Congress, won a Pulitzer, and wrote “two dozen books, which were translated into at least 30 languages. Millions of copies have been sold around the world. The best known include a trilogy on American history, a trilogy on world history and a 1962 social and cultural commentary titled The Image.”

Sculptor Louise Bourgeois is 92. The Guardian asked artists to submit questions to her. “In a way, Bourgeois’s history has paralleled that of modernism and surrealism. Yet she has always been somehow apart. This too is her strength…”

Booker prize-winner DBC Pierre was at a low point. Contemplating suicide. Then he discovered the Romantic classics. “I realised my feelings were being set to music. I froze, and heard every detail of my turmoil being painted in symphony. The music acknowledged tumult, contradiction, confusion, fear and the ultimate conquest of the dark plains of psyche and soul. It announced that misery was life’s default, and beckoned me to stay close to it, proposing conflict to be a sweet and human thing, a many-textured set of riddles that needed recourse to nothing but a working nervous system. The Romantics had found me. I took them full in the vein.”

“During her 46 years in the publishing business, Judith Jones has become the mouse that roared. If any single human being possesses unerring taste, it is possible that she is that person. Her publishing “finds” include a manuscript by an unknown teen-ager named Anne Frank, a cookbook by an unknown chef named Julia Child and a book of poetry by an unknown scribe named Sylvia Plath.”

“One of the most notorious crimes of the Renaissance, the attempted assassination of Florence’s grandest son, Lorenzo dei Medici, has been solved more than 500 years later.”