In Memoriam: 2025, BookMarks Update #89 December, 2025

Friends: As I sit at my desk in Vermont on Christmas Eve, the countryside is blanketed with white. Thirteen different kinds of birds have appeared at our feeders in the last few days, from a red-bellied woodpecker clinging to the suet log to a flock of 32 wild turkeys pecking at the ground. These busy and beautiful creatures have helped distract me from the terrible state of the world. One must hope and act to achieve that Christmas carol line of "peace on earth, goodwill to men (and women and children, as well!)". The birds have figured it out, so why can't we?

As has been my practice in the past, my December reading focused on those authors who died in the last twelve months, an homage to their minds and talents and a thanks to them for sharing those with us:

Even before I entered my ninth decade, I had long been obsessed with mortality and the limits to our time on earth. My favorite quotation from literature is Nabokov's opening sentence in his memoir "Speak, Memory": “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” It is with that sense of the passage of time that I read works by those who have recently died.

Among the many who shuffled off this mortal coil in 2025, I chose the twelve writers pictured above. Here is a brief bio for each author and some comments on their book or play that I selected to read. I've chosen to present the authors in the order in which they died because one of them died in 2024 though it was only in March, 2025 when the news of his death became public.

Daniel Kahneman died in Switzerland on March 27, 2024 at the age of 90, but his death was only made public a year later. The winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work in behavioral economics, Kahneman spent his academic career trying to understand how our minds functioned in interpreting or more often, misinterpreting the world around us. In "Thinking Fast and Slow" he hypothesized two systems of thought, a fast one which is intuitive, effortless, rapid, automatic, and largely beyond our conscious control and a slow one which is rational, orderly, and focused but sadly, indolent and lazy. The result of these two constructs is that we humans frequently make incorrect assessments of probabilities and therefore, often make poor decisions. Factors such as framing, priming, representativeness, anchoring, and availability all distort our view of reality, and our need to provide a coherent narrative of the world often leads to erroneous calculations and unfortunate choices based on plausability not probability. Fairly dense though readable, I must confess to having jumped from page 250 to the Conclusions. If it were available, I'd recommend the Cliffs Notes, not the 500 page version.

Before moving on, it's worth noting the unusual circumstances of Kahneman's death that account for his appearance in the In Memoriam issue of 2025, not the prior year. At the age of 90 in apparent good health and of sound mind, he flew to Switzerland where he ended his life with physician assisted dying. Rational to the end, he chose to act rather than to wait for the inevitable with all its risks of pain, dementia, and loss of capacity---a perfect example of how slow thinking resulted in a decision that was good for him.

Jules Feiffer died in Richfield Springs, New York on January 17, 2025 at the age of 95. Perhaps best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning cartoons, he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004. His cartoons ran in 'The Village Voice' for 40 years and were syndicated to more than 100 newspapers. Feiffer also wrote more than 35 books, plays, and screenplays. He won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film in 1961 with “Munro", and he had retrospective shows of his work at the New York Historical Society and the Library of Congress which honored him for his “remarkable legacy from 1946 to the present, as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children’s book author, illustrator, and art instructor.” 'Knock, Knock", a four person play, ran for six months on Broadway in 1976. It reads like a farce version of Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" as Abe and Cohn who have lived alone in a cabin for 30 years are visited by a genie and then by Joan of Arc. I prefer his cartoons.

Athol Fugard died in Stellenbosch, South Africa on March 8, 2025 at the age of 92. Widely regarded as South Africa’s greatest playwright and acclaimed as “the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world” by 'Time' in 1985, he published more than thirty plays. He is best known for his penetrating political works opposing apartheid, some of which were adapted to the cinema including his novel “Tsotsi” which won an Academy Award in 2005. Five of his plays were nominated for Tonys. "Master Harold and the Boys" is a searing condemnation of apartheid expressed in the dehumanization of both the white adolescent, Hally, and the two Black servants who raised him. The beautiful relationship between Hally and Sam is irretrievably lost as Hally turns his love/hate feelings for his alcoholic, abusive, and white father towards Sam, his friend, teacher, companion and Black man. Listening to this audiobook was a reminder of the powerful impact of great theater.

Mario Vargas Llosa died in Lima, Peru on April 13, 2025 at the age of 89. The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010, Llosa was the author of 20 novels, 18 books of non-fiction, and nine plays. He ran for President of Peru, losing but remaining politically active and controversial for his right wing views. I chose to read "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" because "The Guardian" ranked it as his second best novel and because I had it on my shelves. It's the often very funny story of Mario, an 18 year old news writer for a radio station in Lima and his love for his 32 year old Aunt Julia. Along the way we are introduced to a wonderfully vivid cast of characters including Pedro Comancho, a Bolivian writer of soap operas whose descent into madness parallels Mario and Julia's ascent to love and marriage. LLosas's Nobel prize winning writing was evident from the first page and kept me glued to this fine novel.

Edmund White died in New York City on June 3, 2025 at the age of 85. Credited with bringing gay literature into the mainstream with his novels, short stories, poetry, essays, and non-fiction, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Book Foundation, a PEN/Saul Bellow Award, a Pulitzer nomination, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. "Our Paris: Sketches from Memory" is a love letter to his partner and to the Paris they shared. Hubert Sorin, whose sketches enriched this book, succumbed to AIDS in the mid-90's when the epidemic was still sweeping the world. In a series of vignettes and bios, White re-creates that world with tenderness and care. If you love Paris, especially the vibrant city where White and Subrin lived before the internet, cell phones, and big box stores, you will enjoy this book. White's final book, "The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir" was published just weeks before he died.

Frederic Forsyth died in Buckinghamshire, England on June 9, 2025 at the age of 86. "The Day of the Jackal" was the first of his 18 novels, a dozen of which have been adapted for movies. His books have sold more than 70 million copies in more than 30 languages. This book was a real page turner and kept me eager to return to it at every opportunity. Set in Paris in 1963 at the height of the Algerian civil war for independence, the tale moves back and forth between The Jackal, an assassin hired by extreme French Army nationalists to kill President DeGaulle and the low profile Paris detective, Lebel who is tasked by the Minister of the Interior with thwarting this plan. The book maintains its breakneck pace and tension right through the final sentence and its well-crafted ending. This is a great book for a long plane ride or that beach vacation that seems so far away on this December day.

Bill Moyers died in New York City on June 26 2025 at the age of 91. After a stellar political career which featured stints as LBJ's press secretary and chief of staff, Moyers returned to his first love, journalism. With 26 Emmy nominations and 13 wins, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame and won the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism. And if success in politics and journalism wasn't enough, Moyers fulfilled his love of poetry by bringing the biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival to millions with his eight part series on "The Language of Life" on PBS. "Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft". widened the audience further with interviews and poems by the well known (Stanley Kunitz, Jane Hirshfield, Paul Muldoon, Robert Pinsky, Marge Piercy) and those less famous. Moyers' interviews with these 11 poets elicited interesting and arresting comments about where poetry comes from and how it appears on the page. This is a book that poetry lovers will enjoy and a fitting memorial for this man of great and varied talents.

Paulette Jiles died in her long time home in San Antonio, Texas on July 8, 2025 at the age of 92. Perhaps the least known of these 12 writers, she achieved a measure of fame when "The News of the World" was nominated for a National Book Award. It's the story of Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a 70 year old veteran of the Indian and Civil Wars in Texas, who takes on the burden of returning a 10 year old girl to her relatives 400 miles south near San Antonio. Johanna had been kidnapped by the Kiowas and had lived with them for four years, losing her English and adopting their way of life. Kidd and Johanna experience wild adventures, and a gradual love develops between them. This is a beautiful and moving book . Reading it for the second time didn't prevent me from getting weepy at the beautiful ending. Well worth reading.

David Gergen died in Lexington, Massachusetts on July 10, 2025 at the age of 83. After a distinguished career as a naval officer and valued advisor to four U.S. Presidents, Gergen devoted his life to education. His commenator role on CNN reached millions, and he was a fixture teaching graduate students at the Harvard Kennedy School for decades. There he founded the Center for Public Leadership where his teaching, writing, and mentorship were responsible for an entire generation of Millenials and GenZers entering public life imbued with his spirit of contributing to the public good and preserving American democracy. My wife is a good friend of David's widow, Anne, so I might be biased, but I found "Hearts Touched with Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made" to be insightful and valuable. Using role models from Teddy Roosevelt to FDR, from Mandela to John Lewis, Gergen identified the innate characteristics and the learned skills and strategies that make for great leaders. I wish I had read this book while occupying leadership roles in my own career, but having come to it only during retirement, I plan to give it to my daughters and sons-in-law.

Jane Goodall died in her sleep while visiting a friend in Los Angeles on October 1, 2025 at the age of 91. Honored in the U.S. by the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in her native UK by the OBE, she went from a shy high school graduate who applied for a job in Africa at age 26 after finishing secretarial school to a world-renowned environmental activist. Her ground-breaking studies of the chimpanzees of Gombe in Tanzania changed how human pre-history and evolution are understood, and her Jane Goodall Institute and Roots and Shoots have had an important impact on Africa and the world. "The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide" is the transcript of a series of interviews with Douglas Abrams. It brings an intensity and energy to concerns about climate change, habitat destruction, and cruelty to living things. I listened to portions of this book on an audiobook and found her voice, soft yet passionate to be quite powerful. Not a pollyanna, she proposes hope as the only alternative to depression and despair. Written in 2021, one can only guess at how her message might have intensified in the face of today's ignorant occupant of the White House. Worth reading and even more so, listening.

James Watson died in East Northport, New York on November 6, 2025 at the age of 97. He vaulted into the public's eye at the young age of 25 when as a graduate student at Cambridge, he and Francis Crick were the first to describe the double helix structure of the foundational molecule, DNA. He wrote his version of how that happened in the "The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA", and it is definitely a personal account. Way too chatty and featuring extensive quotes that he could not possibly have recalled word for word, the book was long, tedious, and often petty and small-minded. This was especially true in his disrespect for Rosalind Franklin, a scientist in London whose crystallography was critical to Watson and Crick's discovery. Watson went on to win the Nobel Prize with Crick in 1962 along with Franklin's collaborator, Maurice Wilkins, but Franklin had died in the interim and was thus largely lost to history. Later in life, Watson worked at Harvard for many years, founded the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and ended his days in some disrepute for his views on race and intelligence. The story of DNA and how scientists discovered its critical role in genetics, protein synthesis, and evolution is a wonderful tale, but Watson's self-centered account is not the best way to learn about it.

Tom Stoppard died in Dorset, England on November 29, 2025 at the age of 88. Often compared with Shakespeare and Shaw as the most influential playwright of his generation, Stoppard's 38 plays written and performed from 1960 to 2023 garnered five Tonys, three Oliviers, and an Oscar for the screenplay of "Shakespeare in Love". I sobbed through my reading of his final play, "Leopoldstadt", and totally lost it at the conclusion of the performance we saw on Broadway. His "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern", "Arcadia", and this play "Indian Ink" are similarly powerful, deep,and thought-provoking. "Indian Ink" is reminiscent of E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India" in its exploration and condemnation of the British Empire's humiliation and looting of its Indian colony. Using his method of portraying action from different times on the stage simultaneously, Stoppard tells a moving love story of Flora Crewe and the Indian artist who painted her portrait in the 1930's. Flora's story is told in flashbacks through the eyes of her sister, Nell reading Flora's letters found in an old trunk in the 1950's. The play is currently undergoing a revival in London with Stoppard's widow, Felicity Kendal playing Nell 30 years after she played Flora when the play debuted. Read this or better yet, see it on the stage. Stoppard is brilliant!

So what is to be learned from this momento mori, this exploration of the writings of twelve brilliant men and women from whom we will hear nothing more in the future? For one thing, I am greatly heartened by their longevity. Seven lived into their 90's while the youngest died at 83. This must be evidence that engaging with the world through thinking, creating, writing, and reading is good for the body as well as the soul. On with BookMarks! It is also evident to me that the human condition in all of its richness and randomness, requires us to consider the big questions---why are we here? what comes next? how to live a well-examined life to quote Socrates? It also reminds me of how precious each day is and how bringing gratitude to every morning is so important.

The poems in this month's Poetry Tree on the Charles are drawn from the delightful and delicious volume, "Fooling with Words" featuring interviews by Bill Moyers with 11 poets. These poems which were recited at the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival in 1998 were a part of those interviews. Other than Stanley Kunitz who died at age 100 in 2006, these poets are all still alive and working 27 years later. Here are six among the many wonderful poems in that book including a nonsense poem by Paul Muldoon and Marge Piercy's classic poem and my wife's favorite "To Be of Use":

I'll leave you with these words of wisdom from two of this month's writers.

Jane Hirshfield shared her Zen view of the world with "Everything is changing; everything is connected; pay attention", and Tom Stoppard once said "Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else." Good advice.

In closing, I wish each and every one of the 1006 people who will receive this email a very happy holiday season and a peaceful, happy, healthy, and prosperous 2026.

www.epsteinreads.com