Sidney M. Wolfe, a physician and consumer advocate who for more than 40 years hounded the pharmaceutical sector and the Food and Drug Administration over a variety of issues, died on Jan. 1 at his home in Washington, DC. He was 86.

Dr. Wolfe’s complaints included high prices, dangerous side effects, and overlooked health hazards. His work brought a new level of transparency and accountability to medical care.

Along with the consumer advocate Ralph Nader, Dr. Wolfe founded the Health Research Group in 1971 and, over the next four decades,  used it as a base for his relentless campaigns on behalf of healthcare users. At the door to his office, on the seventh floor of a dingy building near Dupont Circle in Washington, he hung a sign that read “Populus lamdudum defultatus est” — roughly translated from Latin as “The people have been screwed long enough.”

Dr. Wolfe received a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a “genius grant,” in 1990. From 2008 to 2012, he served on the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee, a part of the FDA. He retired from running the Health Research Group in 2013, but remained active, insisting that he had significantly cut back his time commitment from 60 or more hours a week to a mere 40 to 45.

Gerry Holzman, a master woodcarver, who conceived and toiled for 20 years to build a merry-go-round that celebrated New York State with riding animals like a beaver, a cow and a pig as well as portrait panels of citizens like Susan B. Anthony, Grandma Moses and Theodore Roosevelt, died on Dec. 8 at his home in Brunswick, Maine. He was 90.

The carousel, which is 36 feet wide and 23 feet high, was built with the help of about 1,000 volunteer carvers, woodworkers, painters and quilters.

It is a permanent and popular attraction at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, NY.

 Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, who won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for his book, Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, died on Jan. 5 at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.

Mr. Lelyveld was one of the most respected journalists in America for nearly four decades, a globe-trotting adventurer, who reported from Washington, Congo, India, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and London, winning acclaim for his prolific and perceptive articles.

At home, he rose up through The Times’s editorial staff to become its executive editor, arguably the most powerful post in American journalism. In his seven years at the helm, from 1994 to 2001, The Times expanded its national and international readerships, introduced color photographs to the front page, created new sections, and ushered in the digital age with a website and round-the-clock news operations.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Lelyveld won awards from the Overseas Press Club, the Sidney Hillman Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two George Polk Memorial Awards from Long Island University.

Martha Diamond, who captured the changing face of New York’s buildings, streets and vistas with simple expanses of color, died on Dec. 30. She was 79.

She began drawing as a child, and often accompanied her father, a physician, to hospital rounds near the Central Park Conservatory Garden. She remained awe-struck many decades later by the looming Manhattan skyline that appeared as they drove across the Queensboro Bridge.

Among her successes, she appeared in the Whitney’s influential 1984 “MetaManhattan” show as well as in its 1989 Biennial; she won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1980, and an Academy Award for Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Her work has been acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney, the MOMA, and the Guggenheim, among others.

Arno J. Mayer, a historian whose unorthodox reading of the first half of the 20th century challenged conventional understanding of WWI, WWII and the Holocaust, died on Dec. 17 at a senior care facility in Princeton, NJ. He was 97.

Dr. Mayer was the son of Luxembourg Jews who fled to America with his family just ahead of the Nazi invasion in 1940. His career in academia and writings was devoted largely to trying to make sense of the cataclysm the world had experienced. His early scholarship focused on the origins of WWI, while his later writing reached forward to the Holocaust and the founding of Israel.

A common idea threaded through his long career, which included seven books and teaching positions at Brandeis, Harvard and Princeton: that society must be conceived as a whole, and that history is the result of tensions among its constituent parts, like class and social structures.  He argued that WWI, WWII, and the Holocaust were the result of modern capitalism colliding with an entrenched European elite. While several prominent historians supported Dr. Mayer’s thesis, many others denounced it.

Edward Jay Epstein, an author whose deeply researched books challenged conventional wisdom about controversies ranging from whether John F. Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin to whether the whistle-blower Edward Snowden was really a Russian spy, died Jan. 9 in Manhattan. He was 88.

A professional skeptic, Mr. Epstein wrote more than two dozen nonfiction books, many involving allegations of government conspiracies and corporate dereliction.

He earned his doctorate in 1972 from the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies, taught political science at Harvard, the University of California/Los Angeles, and M.I.T., and he wrote for The New Yorker. But he returned to New York in order to become a full time author rather than pursue an academic career. “I wanted to be in New York, ever since I met Clay Felker,” the editor of New York Magazine, he said in an interview last year with the online magazine Air Mail. “He knew the world.”

Herman Raucher, who turned his memories of a summer as a teenager in a Massachusetts beach town, including one of a sexual encounter with a young war widow, into the screenplay for the nostalgic 1971 film “Summer of ’42,” died on Dec. 28 in Stamford, CT. He was 95.

“Summer” won an Oscar for Michel Legrand’s original score, and received four other nominations, including one for Mr. Raucher’s screenplay. It was the fifth-highest-grossing film of 1971, taking in $321 million (or about $245 million in today’s currency) at the box office.

After the filming of “Summer,” was completed, it was in post-production for a year. During that time, Mr. Raucher wrote a novel based on his screenplay, and that became a best seller. When the movie was released, the ad line was “Based on the National best seller,” which Mr. Raucher said “…was absurd because the book was written after the movie.”