That may sound like a law firm, but it isn’t. Wading through the cuttings Elaine had done for me while I was doing my around-the-world-in-around-8-days trip, I came across three obituaries that struck home. One was of a writer whose work I sometimes enjoyed, but whose views on environmentalism I found uncomfortably Bushian. Michael Crichton first came to fame with The Andromeda Strain, published in 1969, was based on a threat that returned with a space probe to Earth. Many of his books had to do with the sort of issues that environmentalists tend to raise, from the side-effects of genetic engineering to those of nanoscience, but he surely didn’t like environmentalists.
Two folk I think I might have got on with better also died while I was circumnavigating, Jacques Picard and Studs Terkel. I loved Terkel’s oral biographies and histories when I was at university around the time The Andromeda Strain was published. Apparently, he adored FDR and wept against a lampost when the latter died, which makes me wonder whether people will do the same when Obama eventually shakes off this mortal coil. Terkel’s ‘bottom-up history’ was an inspiration for the oral histories I did when I was working on my M. Phil. thesis on how people and communities respond to changes in the built environment in the early 1970s.
The third obituary was for Picard, who I remember being hugely impressed by during the 1960s. OOn January 23, he had dived the the bathyscape Trieste to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the western Pacific. Apart from the sheer courage of the deed, sinking down over 35,000 feet into a world where the water pressure is eight tons per square inch, there was the fact that Picard and his team found life even at such unbelievable depths – a discovery that would lead to the subsequent ban on the dumping of nuclear wastes in such ocean trenches. Had it not been for Picard, Crichton might have ended up writing a blockbuster along the lines of The Challenger Strain.
Leave a Reply