AP News, October 6th, 2007
Alexandra Boulat
PARIS (AP) _ French photojournalist Alexandra Boulat, whose photographs from Iraq, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia gave the world an intimate look at life in conflict zones, died Friday. She was 45.
Boulat's photo agency confirmed her death.
Boulat, the daughter of celebrated Life Magazine photographer Pierre Boulat, died in a Paris hospital, Boulat's agency quoted her mother Annie Boulat as saying. She suffered an aneurysm in late June and had since been in a coma, according to her mother, the founder of the France-based Cosmos photo agency.
Boulat, whose photos often focused on war's innocent victims, particularly children, started her career with the Sipa Press agency before she co-founded VII photo agency in 2001.
She covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq and reported on the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. She had lived in the West Bank city of Ramallah for the past two years, most recently covering the rise of the Islamic militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Other projects explored the condition of women in the Muslim world and a series on French designer Yves Saint Laurent. Her photographs have been published in magazines including Time, Newsweek and National Geographic.
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Violet Kazue de Cristoforo
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) _ Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, who received national honors for haikus reflecting the desolation of Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, died Wednesday. She was 90.
De Cristoforo died at her home in Salinas, her daughter Kimi de Cristoforo said.
For more than 50 years, de Cristoforo wrote, compiled and translated haikus created in the detention camps. She was also a staunch advocate in the campaign that led to reparations and an apology from the U.S. government to the 120,000 Japanese-Americans interned in the 1940s.
Her best-known works include "Poetic Reflections of the Tule Lake Internment Camp, 1944," published nearly 50 years after its writing, and "May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow; An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku," which she edited.
De Cristoforo was recognized in September by the National Endowment for the Arts and received a National Heritage Fellowship Award for cultural achievement.
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J. Edward Lundy
DETROIT (AP) _ J. Edward Lundy, a former Ford Motor Co. executive who revolutionized automotive finance, died Tuesday. He was 92.
Ford Motor Co. confirmed his death.
Lundy joined the company in 1946 as part of a group of 10 World War II veterans known as The Whiz Kids. Among the members of the group was Robert McNamara, who later became U.S. defense secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
The group offered its services to Henry Ford II, who wasn't yet 30 and had recently been named head of Ford. At the time, the company hadn't turned a profit in 15 years and was losing $1 million per day, according to a biography of Lundy from the Automotive Hall of Fame.
The Whiz Kids set to work fixing the company. Lundy, a former economics professor at Princeton University, redefined automotive finance, taking it from simple accounting to an important tool for managing and forecasting. Some of his finance rules are still referred to as "Lundyisms" at Ford, spokesman Tom Hoyt said. Lundy also was a mentor to executives who wound up at dozens of companies throughout the industry.
Lundy retired from Ford in 1979. He continued to serve on the company's board of directors until 1985.
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Walter Kempowski
BERLIN (AP) _ Author Walter Kempowski, a chronicler of German history best known for his books on World War II that drew on personal narratives, died Friday. He was 78.
Kempowski died of cancer at a hospital in northwestern Germany, his publisher Albrecht Knaus Verlag said.
The tragedy of World War II, expulsion and displacement and the tumultuous postwar years were themes that dominated his work.
A passionate collector of dairies, memoirs, letters and personal accounts of individual German histories, Kempowski became best known for his written collages of the works, including "Deutsche Chronik" or "German Chronicle" and "Echolot," in addition to his autobiographical works.
Kempowski's best known book in Germany was the novel "Tadelloeser & Wolff," based on his experiences during World War II, which was later made into a movie.
Born in the eastern German city of Rostock in 1929, Kempowski served in the Hitler Youth and also worked as a courier for the Luftwaffe in 1945. After the war, he went to work for the U.S. Army in Wiesbaden, but was arrested by Soviet authorities during a visit to his home city in what later became communist East Germany.
A Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to prison for spying for the U.S., and he spent 1948 to 1956 behind bars. This experience became the fodder for his first novel, "Im Block" or "In the Cell."
