James G. Lowenstein, who as one half of a globe-trotting investigative team with Richard M. Moose wrote a series of reports for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the early 1970s that undermined President Richard M. Nixon’s assessment in Viet Nam, died on Jan. 3 at his home in Washington, age 95. President Nixon had won the White House in 1968 with the promise of a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam — [...]

Solomon Perel, a German Jew who posed as a member of the Hitler Youth to survive WWII, died at age 97. His story was dramatized in the 1990 film, Europa Europa. Shevah Weiss, who served in the Knesset and as an Israeli ambassador to Poland, died at age 87 in the Holy Land. Fred Terna, an artist who tried to exorcize the psychological trauma of his imprisonment in four Nazi concentration and labor camps with [...]

George Zimbel, a photographer who championed ordinary people, but whose two best-known subjects — Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy — died on Jan. 9 in Montreal. He was 93. Mr. Zimbel captured people living their lives — a sailor reading in his lower bunk on a submarine, a small boy dwarfed by a Great Dane, a little girl playing hopscotch in the street, a baby pulling on a doctor’s stethoscope. In a more famous [...]

Carin Goldberg, a celebrated graphic designer who brought an inventive sensibility to book and album covers, died on Jan. 19 at her home in Stanfordville, NY, in Dutchess County. She was 69. Ms. Goldberg was trained as a painter, but was a scholar of designs and typefaces, which she reimagined in elegant and witty combinations on the covers of thousands of albums and books. She designed for CBS television, also Atlantic Records before starting her [...]

Mira Lehr, a versatile Florida artist who helped found an early cooperative for women artists, and whose paintings, sculptures and installations often reflected her concerns about environmental degradation, died on Jan. 24 in Miami Beach. She was 88. She was adventurous in her artistic explorations. Some of her work used Japanese rice paper. She created mangrove labyrinths out of rope and steel that exhibition visitors could walk through. Some of her more recent works involved [...]

Burt Bacharach, the pop composer, arranger, conductor, record producer, and occasional singer, whose hit songs spoke of romantic optimism, died on Feb.8 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94. Mr. Bacharach’s collaborated most frequently with the lyricist Hal David. Together they created songs like “The Look of Love,” “This Guy’s in Love With You,” “Close to You,” and the ever-popular “What the World Needs Now Is Love.” In 1962, the team met Dionne [...]

In his testimony before the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Charles Silverstein persuaded the association to change the language of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders, forging a path that ultimately ended the profession’s pathologizing of homosexuality. Dr. Silverstein died on Jan. 30 at his home in Manhattan. He was 87. Dr. Silverstein wrote books about gay sex, and served as founding editor of The Journal of Homosexuality that worked to break down prejudices [...]

Paul Berg, a 1980 Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who ushered in the era of genetic engineering in 1971 by successfully combining DNA from two different organisms, died on Feb. 15 at his home on the Stanford University campus in California. He was 96. Dr. Berg provided the initial links in the chain of advances that has led to the genetic engineering of new therapeutic treatments for diseases and vaccines against viruses, like Covid-19. “Nurturing curiosity and [...]

Howard Bragman, a publicist who often helped the famous and the reluctantly famous navigate embarrassing or volatile moments, and who also advised gay clients coming forward, died Feb. 11 in Los Angeles. He was 66. Over his career, he promoted products and announced engagements and deaths, but clients often made use of his services in times of crisis. Ed McMahon called on Mr. Bragman when he faced possible foreclosure on his multi-million-dollar home in Beverly [...]

Marianne Mantell who in her early 20s helped start the audiobook revolution by co-founding, with Barbara Holdridge, Caedmon Records, a spoken-word company that turned recordings of literary giants, including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas, into mass-market entertainment, died on Jan. 22 at her home in Princeton, NJ. She was 93. Success came quickly. Caedmon’s first release, an album by Dylan Thomas whose centerpiece was his short story, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” sold [...]