This has been a rough month for all of us. Every day in January it seems, we have had to say goodbye to a celebrity who was in some way special and important to our collective memory and culture.
It has gotten to the point where I feel we have to pause what we are doing and pay these figures their last respects.
Amiri Baraka (1934-2016)
David Bowie (1947-2016)
Monte Irvin (1919-2016)
Andrew Smith (1990-2016)
Alan Rickman (1946-2016)
Glenn Frey (1948-2016)
Read at least three of these and after you finish them, write a post to your blog in which you pay your respects to one of these figures by saying why you think they should be remembered or missed or celebrated.
In a second paragraph, please tell me what obituaries you decided to read and then tell me what similarities you observed in all of them. Consider the similarities (or differences if you observe those too) and indicate why you think those elements appeared (or why they didn't appear) in all three obituaries that you read.
The New York Times did something interesting to commemorate the MLK holiday yesterday. It re-ran the obituaries of black leaders to show how they were regarded in American society at the time of the their deaths. Those of you seeking a extra credit could read these obituaries and compare them to show how our societal perception has changed (hopefully) over the course of the century.
For Martin Luther King's birthday, black leaders as obituaries portrayed them
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