[Two article links follow]
Alexander Cockburn, the leftist journalist, has died. The 71-year-old had been living in Berlin and fighting cancer.
Cockburn was the co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the political newsletter Counterpunch. ...
Cockburn was the son of writer Claud Cockburn. He was born in Ireland, studied at Oxford and came to America in the early 1970s. His writing soon appeared regularly in the Village Voice and the Nation. Searingly clever, sometimes funny, he soon became one of the primary voices of the intellectual left. ...
Cockburn was the author of several books, including "Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press" (1998, with St. Clair), "Corruptions of Empire" (1988), "End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate" (2006, with St. Clair), and "A Short History of Fear" (2009). A number of his books are being reissued in August. ...
More:
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-jc-alexander-cockburn-has-died-rip-20120721,0,3038441.story
"Farewell, Alex, My Friend":
Our friend and comrade Alexander Cockburn died last night in Germany, after a fierce two-year long battle against cancer. His daughter Daisy was at his bedside.
Alex kept his illness a tightly guarded secret. Only a handful of us knew how terribly sick he truly was. He didn't want the disease to define him. He didn't want his friends and readers to shower him with sympathy. ... Alex wanted to keep living his life right to the end. He wanted to live on his terms. And he wanted to continue writing through it all, just as his brilliant father, the novelist and journalist Claud Cockburn had done. And so he did. His body was deteriorating, but his prose remained as sharp, lucid and deadly as ever.
In one of Alex’s last emails to me, he patted himself on the back (and deservedly so) for having only missed one column through his incredibly debilitating and painful last few months. Amid the chemo and blood transfusions and painkillers, Alex turned out not only columns for CounterPunch and The Nation and First Post, but he also wrote a small book called Guillotine and finished his memoirs, A Colossal Wreck, both of which CounterPunch plans to publish over the course of the next year.
Alex lived a huge life and he lived it his way. He hated compromise in politics and he didn't tolerate it in his own life. ...
More (w/photos):
http://www.counterpunch.org/
Blog, a searchable database of obituaries
back to 2001:
http://DeadCelebrityAlert.com
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