Nancy Mairs, "whose encounters with mental illness, disease and religious faith found expression in a series of trenchant, intensely personal essays and memoirs," died December 3, the New York Times reported. She was 73.
Her books include Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer; Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman's Life; Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled; Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith and Renewal; Carnal Acts; and A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith.
"A lifetime of disease and suffering led her, almost inevitably, to write A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories (2001)," the Times noted. "Her interest, she wrote in one of the book's essays, 'A Necessary End,' lay in 'the role of affliction in perfecting human experience.' Viewed from a spiritual perspective, she added, it is 'simply an element in the human condition, to be neither courted nor combated. To refuse to suffer is to refuse fully to live.' "
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E.R. Braithwaite, a Guyanese author, diplomat and former Royal Air Force pilot whose 1959 book To Sir, with Love, "a memoir of teaching in London's deprived East End, was adapted into a hit 1967 film starring Sidney Poitier," died December 12, the New York Times reported. He was 104. The book was "timely, arriving as a wave of migration from the West Indies and South Asia began to transform British society, and as Americans were grappling with persistent segregation."
Braithwaite became a diplomat and represented Guyana at the U.N. and in Venezuela. He wrote several books, "many about racism in countries like South Africa and the United States, where he lived much of his life," the Times noted. Those titles include Paid Servant: A Report About Welfare Work in London (1962); A Kind of Homecoming (1962); Choice of Straws (1965); Reluctant Neighbors; and Honorary White: A Visit to South Africa (1975).