In Memoriam: Hitchens, Havel – and Cesaria Evora

Writer and thinker Christopher Hitchens (center, above) died last Thursday night, December 15, at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas. He was 62.  Great tributes to him (in my view) include this one, by his pal (another great writer) Ian McEwan: Here. 

Vaclav Havel, who was a poet, a dissident and eventual president of the Czech Republic, died Sunday, December 18th at age 75.  He changed everything in 1989. And it has to be said that today’s revolutions must call him to mind, as one of the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th-century, with the spirit and heart of the poet. Here, from the Guardian. Among wonderful things he is said to have said: “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

And here is Cesaria Evora live in Paris in 2004. The Cape Verdean singer who died at age 70 on Saturday sang barefoot, and won a Grammy in 2003, but was great before and after that tribute.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhwmyfFpmLs&feature=related