WARSAW — Tadeusz Konwicki, whose alternately grim, surreal and acidly ironic novels and films made him one of Poland's most important cultural figures, died on Jan. 7 at his home in central Warsaw. He was 88.
Mr. Konwicki's most acclaimed novel, "A Minor Apocalypse," is widely considered among the most important works of post-World War II Eastern European literature and remains required reading for all Polish high school students.
Like the author himself, Mr. Konwicki's frequently self-referential work journeyed from Stalinist-era social realism through disillusionment with Communism, ostracism from the party and an increasingly bitter and gloomy worldview.
"A Minor Apocalypse," published in 1979, is about a despairing writer, also named Konwicki, who is asked by opposition political leaders to set himself on fire outside the country's Community Party headquarters. The novel follows the author through what is to be the final day of his life, wandering around Warsaw, encountering a weird assortment of people and unexpectedly falling in love.

MEXICO CITY — Julio Scherer García, a newspaper and magazine editor who created a school of critical journalism that unmasked Mexico's political corruption and helped lay the groundwork for the country's democratic transition, died here on Jan. 7. He was 88.
Over seven decades, Mr. Scherer defied Mexican presidents, shook up the newspaper culture by introducing political reporting and diverse opinion, and interviewed some of the world's most notable figures, including John F. Kennedy, Zhou Enlai, Fidel Castro and Pablo Picasso.
But it was as the founder and editor of the weekly Proceso, an investigative magazine, that Mr. Scherer made his deepest mark. Its extensively documented articles broke the stranglehold on information imposed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or P.R.I., which governed Mexico for more than 70 years through coercion, corruption and distribution of the spoils, including to owners of the more docile news media.

Dr. Maher Hathout, an Egyptian-born cardiologist who became an influential American Muslim leader, preaching interfaith comity and helping to sustain the Muslim faithful in the United States against the backlash after the Sept. 11 attacks, died on Jan. 3 in Duarte, Calif. He was 79.
"He represented free and critical thinking in helping Muslims face contemporary challenges and bring congruence between living as a Muslim and as an American," Mr. Marayati said. "He influenced many young Muslims to participate in civic life, people who now lead in major government, media and philanthropic institutions."
"Home is not where my grandparents are buried," he said, "but where my grandchildren will be raised."

Colleen McCullough, a former neurophysiological researcher at Yale who, deciding to write novels in her spare time, produced "The Thorn Birds," a multigenerational Australian romance that became an international best seller and inspired a hugely popular television mini-series, died on Thursday on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific, where she had made her home for more than 30 years. She was 77.
"The Thorn Birds," which has never been out of print, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 20 languages. In hardcover, it spent more than a year on the New York Times best-seller list; the paperback rights were sold at auction for $1.9 million, a record at the time.

Rod McKuen, a ubiquitous poet, lyricist and songwriter whose work met with immense commercial success if little critical esteem, died on Thursday in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 81.
For a generation of Americans at midcentury and afterward, Mr. McKuen's poetry formed an enduring, solidly constructed bridge between the Beat generation and New Age sensibilities. Ranging over themes of love and loss, the natural world and spirituality, his work was prized by readers for its gentle accessibility while being condemned by many critics as facile, tepid and aphoristic.

G. G. Michelson, who helped dismantle barriers for women as a longtime executive of R. H. Macy & Company, as an adviser to mayors and often as the only female member of corporate boards, died on Saturday at her home in Greenwich Village. She was 89.
Mrs. Michelson's climb to the executive suite was strewn with obstacles, a passage marked by the struggles of the Depression, family illness, stays in orphanages and a college career that took her through law school but could not promise a woman a job in her chosen field.

Francesco Rosi, a filmmaker who was fascinated with power, poverty and politics, and whose commitment to social issues made him a direct heir to the traditions of Italian neorealist cinema of the postwar years, died on Saturday in Rome. He was 92.
The French critic Michel Ciment once counted Mr. Rosi among "the three last giants of Italian cinema," the others being Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. His films won top prizes at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals. Yet he never acquired the kind of international fame many of his peers knew.

One frigid January night in 1969, Faith Seidenberg vividly recalled a few years later, she and another woman, shivering "as much from fear as from the cold," boldly swung open the double doors of McSorley's Old Ale House in Manhattan, which "had withstood for 115 years the entry of female customers."
Escorted to the door, they left voluntarily. Then Ms. Seidenberg and the other woman, Karen DeCrow, sued. And on Aug. 10, 1970, after a federal judge issued a landmark ruling in their favor and on the very afternoon that Mayor John V. Lindsay signed legislation barring discrimination in public places on the basis of sex, the manager of McSorley's invited Barbara Shaum, who owned a leather goods store two doors away, into the tavern as the first female patron admitted under the new law. (Ms. DeCrow went on to become president of the National Organization for Women.)

Paul C. Sprenger, a Washington lawyer who represented female iron miners in Minnesota in the nation's first class-action lawsuit focused on sexual harassment — at the time an emerging legal concept — died on Monday while on vacation in Curaçao. He was 74.
Mr. Sprenger first became involved in gender discrimination litigation in the 1970s, when he represented Shyamala Rajender, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Minnesota, which at the time had never had a tenured female professor in engineering or the hard sciences.
"It was the first sex discrimination class action against a university," Ms. Lang said. "He won a 10-year consent decree, and it changed higher education for women."

Robert Stone, who wrote ambitious, award-winning novels about errant Americans in dangerous circumstances or on existential quests — or both — as commentary on an unruly, wayward nation in the Vietnam era and beyond, died on Saturday at his home in Key West, Fla. He was 77.