Passages

Tung Chee-hwa, 89, Hong Kong’s first postcolonial leader who struggled to cope with an Asian financial crisis and growing protests for democracy in the early years under Chinese rule, died Tuesday. Tung, a shipping tycoon, had little political experience before a panel of pro-Beijing elites picked him to be the first leader of the southern Chinese territory after the end of British colonial rule in 1997.

Edward Field, 102, one of the most accomplished American poets of the postwar era, whose award-winning work — characterized by everyday language and an openly gay landscape — was forged by nearly a century of living in bohemian New York, died Sept. 6 at his home in Manhattan.

Field found his calling by happenstance. As a newly enlisted soldier boarding a troop train during World War II, he was handed a bag by a Red Cross worker. It contained a toothbrush, a comb, a candy bar and an anthology of poetry. He was just 18 and had never read a book of poetry or written a line. But he would go on to write 12 books of poetry and edit two anthologies, “A Geography of Poets” (1979) and “A New Geography of Poets” (1992), and receive, among other honors, the Prix de Rome, the Lambda Literary Award, the Shelley Memorial Award and the W.H. Auden Prize.

Robin Morgan, 85, a wholesome child star of the 1940s and ’50s who grew up to become an all-American radical as a poet, essayist, editor and second-wave feminist, has died. Morgan, who was still working on new books and poems, died Sept. 5 in New York after suffering a series of health problems in recent weeks, said her son, Blake Morgan.

Morgan caused shock waves in 1970 when she published an essay in Rat, an underground newspaper. The article, titled “Goodbye to All That,” named specific men as sexists. “Goodbye to Hip Culture and the so-called Sexual Revolution,” she wrote, stating that the murderous Charles Manson was “only the logical extreme of the normal American male’s fantasy.” The piece became an instant classic of second-wave feminism; it also brought her death threats from counterculture activists. “They called it ‘the shot heard round the Left,’ ” she told The New Yorker in 2008.

Hideki Shirakawa, 90, a Japanese chemist who shared the Nobel Prize in 2000 for the discovery of plastics that can conduct electricity, a breakthrough that had commercial applications including making new types of semiconductors and inexpensive solar panels, died Aug. 24 in Yokohama, Japan. His death, at a hospital, was from liver cancer, according to the University of Tsukuba, where he was an emeritus professor.

Benjamin M. Rosen, 93, a Wall Street analyst and venture capitalist whose early efforts to rally investors behind companies including Apple, Lotus and Compaq — where he served as chair for almost 20 years — made the revolutionary promises of personal computing a reality, died Aug. 23 in New York City.

Rosen is often mentioned among the pantheon of gods of the personal computer — Bill Gates for software, Andy Grove for processors and Steve Jobs for design — for marshaling the financial resources necessary to help the industry take off.

Benny Lattimore, 86, the soul singer, songwriter and pianist known as Latimore whose sultry baritone, coifed hair and funky songs about romance — notably “Let’s Straighten It Out” — made him an R&B fixture of the 1970s and ’80s, died on Aug. 22 at his home in Riverview, Fla., near Tampa. He released his first album with music producer Henry Stone’s Glades label, the self-titled “Latimore,” in 1973. His swingy cut “(They Call It) Stormy Monday” received so much radio time in Chicago that it was later released as a single.

Dr. Paul S. Russell, 101, who was born before the discovery of penicillin and who became a leading transplant surgeon, adapting scientific breakthroughs in the laboratory to help make the miracle of a new kidney or liver a relatively common procedure, died Aug. 22 at his home in Westwood, Mass. His association with Massachusetts General spanned more than seven decades, and he was a professor at Harvard Medical School for nearly as long. He was appointed chief of surgery at Mass General in 1962, and he performed its first kidney transplant the next year. He was director of the hospital’s transplantation unit from 1968 to 1990.

Dr. William G. Anderson, 98, an osteopath who in 1961 set aside his medical practice in Albany, Ga., to lead a movement against the city’s entrenched system of racial segregation, attracting national attention and the involvement of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died Aug. 16 at his home in Detroit.

The Albany Movement, a coalition of the city’s Black and civil rights groups, appeared at a pivotal moment in the struggle against Jim Crow segregation, coming between early successes like the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 and later triumphs like the Birmingham campaign and the March on Washington, both in 1963. With Anderson as its leader, the movement in Albany pushed for integration of local businesses and tested federal laws against discrimination in interstate bus travel. Over a year, the police arrested some 1,200 demonstrators who belonged to the movement, including Anderson, who was briefly jailed.

Timothy Carney, 82, a diplomat who relished difficult assignments in war-torn countries and pushed against bureaucratic restrictions, died Aug. 10 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. The cause was cancer.

Carney foresaw the looming menace of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship in Cambodia in the mid-1970s, and engaged with Afrikaners in the mid-1980s, convinced they were opening up to the idea of majority rule in South Africa. He opposed closing the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, in 1996 while Osama bin Laden established himself there — the closure deprived the U.S. of a valuable listening post. He was skeptical of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, seen by many in Washington, D.C., as a valuable ally, as Aristide prepared to retake power. In Iraq, Carney was publicly disgusted with the absence of U.S. planning.