BLOGGER TEMPLATES AND TWITTER BACKGROUNDS

Friday, December 18, 2009

A Noteworthy Reporter


The late Yuri Zarakhovich

The Crappy Times is drooling to get their hands on this crack reporter, because most of their reporters write like they're smoking crack. But Yuri Zarakhovich was a class act. This tough Russian-born reporter passed away on November 17, 2009 at the age of 63 from pancreatic cancer. The Time article below illustrates why he is worth saluting.

Yuri Zarakhovich's life was full of skulduggery, danger and crisis. He did, after all, report for TIME as the Soviet empire decayed, fell and tried to resurrect itself as the new Russia. It was two decades of journalistic drama on one of history's biggest stages, with Zarakhovich dodging bullets and traveling from one breakaway republic to another, meeting larger-than-life characters like Vladimir Putin, whom he interviewed along with TIME's editors for our 2007 Person of the Year issue. Zarakhovich was as big a personality as the Russia he loathed and loved. His stories and jokes were like conspiracies, full of asides that were whole tales. If you didn't get the punch line, you laughed anyway because Yuri's laugh was loud and infectious. Zarakhovich, who died Nov. 17 at 63, was living in retirement in Florida and expecting his first grandchild when he was given a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer about a month ago. His daughter had the baby--a boy--the day before Zarakhovich died. She checked out of the hospital early and got the child to Yuri, who held the infant for a few hours before passing away. He named the boy Theodore.



1 comments:

Tom & Icy said...

The Crappy Times can't afford him.