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| My hero Ernest Shephard by Richard Holmes I am not sure what he would make of it: disbelief, amusement, or irritation that I should single him out. But my hero is Ernest Shephard, who spent much of his time on the Western Front as a company sergeant major.He was born in Lyme Regis in 1892, the son of a photographer who was to lose two of his three boys in the war. He enlisted in the part-time Special Reserve in 1909, and transferred to the regular 1st Battalion, the Dorset Regiment, later that year, becoming a lance-corporal in 1910, a corporal in 1913 and a sergeant in 1914. The fact that he was at home on recruiting duties probably saved his life, for 1st Dorsets suffered cruelly: in October the battalion lost 399 men, 148 killed, in a single action.Sergeant Shephard joined 1st Dorsets in January 1915, and began to keep a diary. There is horror, such as his first experience of gas: "Men were caught by fumes and in dreadful agony, coughing and vomiting, rolling on the ground . . ." There is a serious interest in food: "We made a grand stew in a washing bucket . . ." And there is an abundance of that comradeship that made war tolerable. When Company Sergeant Major Shapton was killed, Shephard wrote: "In Sam I have lost my dearest chum. We were always together whenever possible. He was an Army Reserve man when war broke out, and came from Canada to rejoin. I shall never forget the afternoon C Company was cut up . . . When I got to his trench I found him crying. He had been working like a demon, digging his men out and attending to the wounded . . ."Commissioned in November 1916, Shephard died in January 1917, commanding a company of 5th Dorsets. His last recorded act was characteristically professional. When he knew his position was hopeless, he warned the supporting company to fall back, so as not to be overwhelmed too. Ernest Shephard is buried on the Somme, in the AIF Burial Ground at Grass Lane, Flers, and I go to see him as often as I can. First world warguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Shel Dorf obituary Devoted comic fan and historian who founded the international Comic-Con convention in the USShel Dorf, who has died aged 76, was a fan and historian of comics and the founder of the annual Comic-Con International convention in San Diego, California. It was in early 1970 that Dorf proposed the idea of a convention to a local comics fanclub. He persuaded the comic book artist Jack Kirby and science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury to appear and even to waive speakers' fees. In August, the first gathering was held and deemed a huge success, with 300 attendees who enjoyed artists' speeches, bought and sold comics, and watched classic comic-related movies.Dorf and his committee did not dream that San Diego Golden State Comic-Con, as the first one was called, would grow into the largest convention of its kind. As Kirby predicted, the convention went on to embrace movies, television, animation and other forms of imaginative fiction in the 80s, when the event outgrew what was then the largest convention facility in San Diego. In 1989, the city opened a larger centre ringed by luxury hotels as part of a civic redevelopment project inspired in part by the success of Comic-Con. Attendance at the 2009 event topped 125,000.Dorf was born in Detroit, Michigan. Smitten with comic strips at an early age, he began clipping them from newspapers and pasting them into large, keepsake scrapbooks. He also corresponded with the creators of many of his favourite characters. A trip at the age of 16 to meet Chester Gould, the creator of Dick Tracy, was especially memorable, as was his correspondence with Milton Caniff, creator of Terry and the Pirates.With an eye towards someday joining their ranks, Dorf studied art at Cass Technical high school and the Chicago Art Institute, but his many attempts to sell a strip of his own creation proved fruitless. Though he found intermittent work in newspapers, the closest he came to the comic strip profession was when his hero, Caniff, hired him to do the lettering on his military-themed adventure strip Steve Canyon. With great pride, Dorf inked in the lettering in the captions and dialogue balloons for 14 years, until Caniff died in 1988. He also spent several years assembling a line of books that reprinted old Dick Tracy strips.By that time, Dorf had withdrawn from Comic-Con. Throughout the 1980s, he quarrelled with the convention operators over the direction of the event. Once a prominent host, he resigned in 1984 and scaled back his attendance until, by 2002, he would no longer even attend the convention he had founded. "It's become too big and too depressing," he told friends. "The last time there, I could barely find any comic books."Dorf's appreciation and promotion of comics were instrumental in the growing respect and admiration for the art form, leading them to be preserved in libraries, exhibited in galleries and studied and dissected by scholars. Dorf was especially proud that two comic characters – a football player in Caniff's Steve Canyon and a wizened leader of lost boys in a Mister Miracle comic by Jack Kirby – bore close resemblances to himself.Dorf became reclusive in his final years. Items from his extensive collection of comic art and memorabilia were either sold or donated to the archives at Ohio State University. His health worsened and after suffering a fall in 2008, he was hospitalised for the rest of his life. He is survived by his brother Michael. • Sheldon Dorf, Comic-Con founder, born 5 July 1933; died 3 November 2009Comic-ConComicsUnited StatesArtguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books of the decade: Your best books of 2007 Beyond the Potter hysteria, this year produced some fine writing. My favourite was Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book – what about you?For anybody finding it a little bracing over on Sam's worst book of the decade post – and I'm still wincing from Sam's sideswipe about The Impressionist – let's get back to where we left off spreading love and take a look back at the best books of 2007.Not too much love, perhaps, because 2007 was, of course, a Harry Potter year. And not just any old Harry Potter year: it was the year of Harry Potter's final appearance between hard covers. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold over 4m copies in 2007 alone – so I don't think I'm spoiling it for many if I mention that it was the volume where Harry kicked the bucket and then didn't, only to be definitively squashed by JK's repeated denials of any plans to continue her blockbusting children's serial with an eighth instalment. Two years later there are no signs yet of Harry Potter and the Midlife Crisis, but there's still time, there's still time. After all, HP7 was the kind of book which did much, much more than dominate the bestseller lists. Embargo-busting reviews, supermarket shenanigans, a major character tumbling out of the closet: Deathly Hallows had it all.There's no question that it was the book which dominated 2007, but I think we can all agree that it was a long way off being the best (can't we ... please?) You might not be a fan of Anne Enright's Booker-winning The Gathering, but a quick glance down the Booker longlist throws up Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Nicola Barker's Darkmans and Edward Docx's Self Help. Look beyond fiction and you'll find Rosemary Hill's life of Pugin, God's Architect, and Daljit Nagra's Look We Have Coming to Dover. You're not seriously going to maintain that Harry's showdown with Voldemort is a better book than every one of these?It's also the year where my reading starts turning into my to-read pile – I still can't quite believe I haven't got around to Exit Ghost – but there were a few that stick in the memory. Javier Cercas's The Speed of Light came out in 2007, but this powerful story of a Vietnam veteran isn't a patch on 2004's Soldiers of Salamis. Sarah Hall's bleak vision of a woman's rebellion in a post-oil world, The Carhullan Army, is perhaps her best yet – she welds a fine appreciation for the Cumbrian hills onto a firecracker plot that still makes me wince. And there was Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions, which I enjoyed immensely, Sam, but I'm not getting into that again … so for me the book of 2007 is a collection of poetry that is perhaps the antithesis of Harry Potter: Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book. This watery hymn to language and culture and putting the right word in the right place will never make it onto the shelves at Tesco, but it makes me smile for sheer joy at its wit, its beauty, its oceanic melancholy. You might want to jog your memory with our special report from 2007, or Wikipedia's lists. Over to you.Best books of 2007Harry PotterRichard Leaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Books: Resilience, Not Misery, in Coping With Death The findings of George A. Bonanno, a clinical psychologist who interviewed hundreds of grieving people, were different from those of Freud and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. feeds.nytimes.com |
Author, author: Hisham Matar Hisham Matar has just learnt that his father, who disappeared 20 years ago, might be aliveThree years ago I started writing a novel about a man haunted by the absence of his Âfather. He stalks his lovers, lives in his houses and wears his clothes. He is a most faithful son. And now, weeks from finishing that novel, I learn that my father, who disappeared 20 years ago, might be alive. Someone saw him in a secret political prison in Tripoli. "He is well. Frail, but well," was the man's message. He saw my father in 2002, but only recently was he able to send me the message. This is tremendous news. Tremendous in the way a storm or a flood can be tremendous.Uncanny how reality presses against that precious quiet place of dreaming. As if life is jealous of fiction.In March 1990, Egyptian secret service agents abducted my father from his home in Cairo. For the first two years they led us to believe that he was being held in Egypt, and told us to keep quiet or else they could not guarantee his safety. In 1992 my father managed to smuggle out a letter. A few months later my mother held it in her hand. His careful handwriting curled tightly on to itself to fit as many words as possible on the single A4 sheet of paper. Words with hardly a space between, above or beneath them. No margins, they run to the brink."Give me your hand: you are now within a foot / Of the extreme verge," Edgar says to his blind father in King Lear. How many words do you need to say everything? How many words before the verge?I have imagined my father composing this letter in his head, reciting it in a whisper as he paced the "concrete room" during those precious, silent hours between midnight and early morning when the loudspeaker in the centre of the ceiling stopped its relentless blaring out of revolutionary songs and speeches. With paper being scarce, he must have rehearsed what he was going to write, committed it to memory as he did countless poems. His prose is even more measured than usual. Composure and control to crack the heart. He quoted from books, as if to say "I am still here, still part of the world". He offered precise and useful advise to my brother and me: "If you embark on a venture and it fails, move on to something else." And "An honest profit should never exceed 30%." He apologised to his wife for all that she had to go through. He apologised to my brother and to me. But then he said if he had it all to do again he would have walked the same path. "One day justice will be done and the jailer will replace the jailed."Over the years I have met several former prisoners who were there when my father was first taken to Abu Salim, in Tripoli, in March 1990. When the news made the rounds that Jaballa Matar had been captured, several Âprisoners began ululating. A mournful cry intended both as defiance to the oppressor, and as comfort to a man they regarded as their leader. My Âfather seemed to have accepted this role. One former prisoner had witnessed him strike back at a torturer. "A futile retaliation," the man told me, "but the news ran like wildfire in the prison and bolstered our hearts." I have had nightmares about what happened next, the moment after the Â"futile Âretaliation". This is perhaps why I am by nature unenthusiastic about such acts of heroism. I am as proud of his heroism as I begrudge the circumstances that demanded it. How often had I yearned for a proÂvincial man as father, growing old in his house.The only other letter he managed to smuggle out to us was in 1995. Then in April 1996 the guards came and moved him and his companion Izzat al-Megaryef, a political dissident who was handed over by the Egyptians on the same day and in the same way. The two men were moved, it is not clear where. Their few belongings – cigarettes, a radio, clothes – turned up in the black market run by the guards. Two months later, in June 1996, a massacre took place in the same prison. Libyan authorities shot dead approximately 1,200 political prisoners. Guards went from cell to cell with a list of names. More prisoners were bussed in and deposited in the open courtyard of Abu Salim prison. Then gunfire.How many bullets do you need to kill 1,200 men?How many bullets per head should you budget for?The shooting went on for six hours. One prisoner described it as "a drill Âinside your head". And when I first heard this I thought: "Someone must write about this." And here I am still unable to write about it. How do you write about it? How many words should you use?"The longer the gunfire went on, the less likely it seemed that it would ever stop," the former prisoner said. Just beneath it you could still hear the sound of grown men begging for mercy. Then silence. A couple of days later the stink had become so unÂbearable that no matter how empty your belly, you could not keep from retching.The news of the massacre did not reach the outside world until 2001. Gradually, various accounts began to fill in the hideous puzzle. And so, corresponding with the end of any reported sightings of my father, we began to fear the worst. Then this Âtremendous news comes.Too many facts. I am fed up of the facts. My father is not in the facts. Where is the man I liked to make laugh? Where is the man who would only respond to my letters when they were in Arabic? I would like to write a letter in Arabic. Where is the man who used to say the word "Patience" to me as if it were a vow? Where is the man to whom I had promised a granddaughter called Taswahin – which in Arabic means "a woman equal to any man" – the name he had always wanted for the daughter he never had. Where is the man who used to call me Sharh Elbal (literally "he who soothes the mind")? He liked to quote the repeated line in the Qur'an, from the chapter "Soothing": "With hardship comes ease. / With hardship comes ease."Where is the man whose pipe stands in a cup with the five pencils I sharpen every morning? His coat hangs in my wardrobe. Maybe it still fits him.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |