AUGUST 16, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 6

Milestones

By HANNAH BEECH

CONFIRMED. RICHARD HOLBROOKE, 58, dogged American diplomat, as Ambassador to the United Nations, by the U.S. Senate; in Washington. Holbrooke's nomination was blocked for 14 months by Senate Republicans, leaving the U.S. without a coherent voice in foreign-policy quagmires like Kosovo and Iraq. America's reputation within the U.N. has already suffered from Republican refusal to pay more than $1 billion in dues that the U.S. owes to the international body.

APPOINTED. GEORGE ROBERTSON, 53, tough-talking British Defense Secretary, as Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; in Brussels. An architect of NATO's Kosovo campaign, Robertson will replace Javier Solana, who is taking up a post as the European Union's high representative for foreign and security affairs. Robertson's biggest challenges will include enlarging NATO's security umbrella to include Eastern Europe, smoothing relations with Russia and enhancing the alliance's military capabilities so it can rely less on U.S. firepower.

DIED. RODNEY ANSELL, 44, rough-hewn Australian rancher, who served as the inspiration behind the Crocodile Dundee films, after a shootout he initiated ended both his life and that of an outback police officer; in a remote stretch of the Northern Territory, Australia. Ansell struck fame in 1977 after a crocodile overturned his canoe and forced him to survive the wild for two months by eating wallabies and drinking buffalo blood. But the strain of transforming from unknown bushman to celluloid legend reportedly gnawed at Ansell, who was bitter that he earned no money from the blockbusters.

DIED. ALBERTO GIRONELLA, 70, Mexican surrealist painter, whose subjects ranged from revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata to pop queen Madonna; in Mexico City. Although his surrealist predecessors like Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros painted sweeping tableaus of poverty and suffering, Gironella refused to be limited by his social conscience and filled his canvases with brash, Bohemian images.

DIED. WILLIE MORRIS, 64, American writer and former Harper's magazine editor whose mellifluous prose captured the homey small-town rhythms and jarring racist quirks of his beloved Mississippi Delta; in Jackson, Mississippi. In his 1967 memoir North Toward Home, Morris recounted his rise from prankster good ol' boy to New York literary wunderkind. After moving back south in 1980, he set up an informal literary salon, encouraging aspiring writers like John Grisham and Donna Tartt.

DIED. NIRAD CHAUDHURI, who died last week at age 101, was a polymathic cultural commentator who liked to look on the dark side. He was born in Kishorganj, East Bengal (now Bangladesh). After attending university in Calcutta, he worked for the colonial government, then as a journalist, as secretary to a prominent politician and eventually for All India Radio in Delhi.

Eulogy

NIRAD CHAUDHURI, who died last week at age 101, was a polymathic cultural commentator who liked to look on the dark side. He was born in Kishorganj, East Bengal (now Bangladesh). After attending university in Calcutta, he worked for the colonial government, then as a journalist, as secretary to a prominent politician and eventually for All India Radio in Delhi.

On a hunch that he wouldn't live long, he wrote his life story, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, which appeared in 1951. Indians were offended by its dedication "To the memory of the British Empire in India," but it was praised by Winston Churchill. Not until 1955, when he was 57, did Chaudhuri visit Europe, a journey described in A Passage to England. His tiny figure in Western dress became familiar in Oxford, where he settled in 1970. He wrote Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, the second part of his life story, when he was 90. The last of his 14 books, Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, which appeared when he was 100, predicted the destruction of civilization by television.

Despite his gloomy musings, he loved many things, including England, opera, nature, literature, the poetry of fellow Bengali Rabindranath Tagore and, most of all, life. His autobiography ends: "I feel that I shall be content to be nothing for ever after death in the ecstasy of having lived and been alive for a moment."

--Lucy Fisher