Milestones

Appreciation At this moment in our checkered cultural history, when buff young hotties eat cockroaches on Fear Factor just to get on TV, it’s comforting to think about HUNTER S. THOMPSON, somebody for whom extreme behavior was neither a pose nor a ploy. Thompson, who committed suicide on Feb. 20 at his home in Woody Creek, Colo., at the age of 67, was best known for his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, an account of a lost week he spent reporting from the gambling capital and succumbing to ranting, hallucinatory, pharmaceutical paranoia. The book is subtitled A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, and it may be about America, or it may be about Thompsonby the end you don’t really distinguish between the two.

Thompson’s fearlessly subjective, expressive, propulsive journalistic style (in succeeding books like Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72) has been endlessly imitated but never equaled. That’s because nobody else had Thompson’s gift for describing altered states of mind with absolute lucidity. More important, no one else had his curiosity about this country and his righteous, inexhaustible rage at its numerous shortcomings, a rage that never cooled or hardened into cynicism. If he overindulgedand he didit was in pursuit of a truth he felt he could find in no other way. “There is no honest way to explain it,” he wrote, “because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” He has gone over now, and we can only hope he finally found what he was looking for.
By Lev Grossman

NAMED. TOSHIYUKI SHIGA, 51, as chief operating officer of Nissan Motor Co.; replacing current chief executive Carlos Ghosn, who has turned around the struggling carmaker since his hiring in 1999; in Tokyo. Shiga, a 29-year Nissan veteran, most recently ran company operations outside of North America, Europe and Japan and is credited with boosting sales in China and Southeast Asia. He will report directly to Ghosn, who in April assumes a dual role as president and CEO of both Nissan and its parent company Renault.

DIED. LEE EUN-JOO, 24, actress who was one of the biggest box-office draws in South Korean film; of an apparent suicide by hanging; in Bundang, South Korea. Lee, who earned fame for her roles in such blockbusters as The Brotherhood of War and The Scarlet Letter, suffered from insomnia and depression, according to her family. A note, apparently written in her own blood and reading, in part, “Mom, I am sorry and I love you,” was found at the scene.

DIED. SANDRA DEE, 62, once America’s perkiest, most popular female teen idol, who caused squeals in teenage bedrooms nationwide when she married pop singer Bobby Darin; of complications from kidney disease; in Thousand Oaks, California. She played the innocent tomboy surfer in the 1959 film Gidget, a signature role that led to a string of similar parts, but showed a more serious side in films like Imitation of Life and A Summer Place. She gradually disappeared from Hollywood, battling anorexia and drinking problems after her turbulent marriage to Darin ended in 1967.

DIED. ZDZISLAW BEKSINSKI, 75, leading Polish surrealist painter; from multiple stab wounds; at his home in Warsaw. Renowned for his disturbing depictions of death and decay, Beksinski was also a prolific photographer and in recent years expanded his work to include computer graphics, producing unsettling images of monstrous, disembodied faces. Two teenage relatives of the artist’s longtime aide have been arrested and charged in the murder.

DIED. RAYMOND MHLABA, 85, member of the African National Congress and for 26 years a political prisoner on South Africa’s infamous Robben Island; in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Along with Nelson Mandela, Mhlaba was one of four members of the prison’s “High Organ,” which negotiated with the apartheid government for better conditions and the release of political prisoners. Freed in 1989, he went on to serve as a regional official and as High Commissioner to Uganda and Rwanda. Upon Mhlaba’s death, Mandela called him “one of the real stalwarts of our movement, a person who in his life and work embodied the highest values our struggle stood for and strove towards.”

DIED. ZHU QIAOMEI, 96, oldest of the estimated 60 surviving Chinese “comfort women” who were forced into sexual servitude by Japanese soldiers during World War II; in Shanghai. Zhu was 27 years old and two months pregnant when captured by Japanese troops in 1938 and conscripted into one of Shanghai’s 83 “comfort centers.” Along with 15 other surviving comfort women from various Asian countries, Zhu joined an ongoing class-action lawsuit against the Japanese government filed in the U.S. in 2000. “Her only wish was to get justice,” her son, Zhou Xin, said in a statement to Chinese media after her death.

Fake Watch If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Fed up with losing revenue and market share to China’s ubiquitous DVD pirates, Warner Home Video last week announced that it is setting up a mainland video distribution network with a local partnera first for any foreign studioand that it is pricing its discs to compete with local fake copies. The studio (which, like TIME, is owned by Time Warner) is gambling that people will be willing to pay about $3 apiece for authentic DVDs of Warner hits like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. With pirated discs selling for as little as $1, however, Chinese consumers may still not bite.