Table of Contents

Volume 47, Number 9 · May 25, 2000

Thomas Powers, The Unanswered Question

Copenhagen a play by Michael Frayn, directed by Michael Blakemore, opened April 11, 2000.

Zbigniew Herbert, Buttons (poem)

Tatyana Tolstaya, The Making of Mr. Putin

First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President Vladimir Putin, with Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, Andrei Kolesnikov, Translated from the Russian by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. The Russian original, Ot pervovo litsa, is available on the website www.vagrius.com.

Mary Robinson, Chechnya: Mary Robinson's Report

P.N. Furbank, Dreams of the Body

Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David After the Terror by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth

Louis Menand, Bloom's Gift

Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

Garry Wills, The Vatican Regrets

Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past for the Doctrine of the Faith, December 1999 by Rev. Christopher Begg, Msgr. Bruno Forte, Rev. Sebastian Karotemprel S.D.B., Msgr. Roland Minnerath, Rev. Thomas Norris, Rev. Rafael Salazar Cárdenas M.Sp.S., Msgr. Anton Strukelj. Issued from the Vatican by Cardinal Ratzinger of the Congregation. Available at www.vatican.va.

Alison Lurie, On Edward Gorey (1925–2000)

Timothy Garton Ash, Beauty and the Beast in Burma

Robert Skidelsky, All in the Family

Five Sisters: The Langhornes of Virginia by James Fox

Cathleen Schine, A Tale of Two Countries

Le Mariage by Diane Johnson

Larry McMurtry, Cookie Pioneers

Something in the Soil by Patricia Nelson Limerick

Texas History Movies text by John Rosenfield Jr., illustrations by Jack Patton

J.M. Coetzee, Messages & Silence

Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai

Diamond Dust by Anita Desai

Richard Horton, An Autopsy of Dr. Osler

William Osler: A Life in Medicine by Michael Bliss

David Gilmour, The Man Who Would Be Good

The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Volume 4: 1911-19 edited by Thomas Pinney

Christopher Benfey, Tea with Okakura

Okakura Tenshin and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston October 23, 1999-March 26, 2000. an exhibition at Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Nagoya, Japan,, Catalog of the exhibition edited by Saeko Yamawaki, by Nobuko Sakamoto, by Makiko Yamada, by Hitomi Sato

The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura

Bill McKibben, Acquaintance of the Earth

Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists: A Conservative Manifesto by Peter Huber

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken, by Amory Lovins, by L. Hunter Lovins

Julian Moynahan, Not-So-Great Expectations

Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt

'Tis: A Memoir by Frank McCourt

All Souls: A Family Story from Southie by Michael Patrick MacDonald

Jonathan Mirsky, The Never-Ending War

Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy by Robert S. McNamara, by James G. Blight, by Robert K. Brigham, by Thomas J. Biersteker, by Herbert Y. Schandler

Reporting Vietnam, Part One: American Journalism 1959-1969; Part Two: American Journalism 1969-1975 two volumes

American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War by David Kaiser

Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF's Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War by Robert K. Brigham

Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall

Dragon Ascending: Vietnam and the Vietnamese by Henry Kamm

The Secret War Against Hanoi: Kennedy's and Johnson's Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam by Richard H. Shultz Jr.

In the Jaws of History by Bui Diem, with David Chanoff

A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam by Lewis Sorley

Vietnam, the Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict by Michael Lind

America's War in Vietnam: A Short Narrative History by Larry H. Addington

Memories of a Pure Spring by Duong Thu Huong, Translated from the Vietnamese by Nina McPherson, by Phan Huy Duong


Letters

John P. Frank, Ronald Dworkin, A Question of Ethics
Martin Malia, Aileen Kelly, Slutsky & History
James Wood, Auden's 'Flippancy'
Antony Beevor, Jason Epstein, Stalingrad, cont'd.
Claudia Roth Pierpont, Passionate Mind



Contributors

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke and the author of The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. His new book, A Summer of Hummingbirds, will be published next spring. (December 2007)

J. M. Coetzee, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003, is currently Visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of Adelaide. His latest novel, Diary of a Bad Year, was published in December. (March 2008)

P. N. Furbank is the author of Diderot and, with W.R. Owens, A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe. (December 2007)

Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies and Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. His most recent book is Free World. (August 2007)

David Gilmour's The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj was published last year. His previous books were biographies of Lord Curzon and Rudyard Kipling. (December 2007)

Zbigniew Herbert, a leading Polish poet, died in 1998. The Collected Poems: 1956–1998, edited and translated by Alissa Valles, will be published by Ecco in February. (January 2007)

Richard Horton is a physician. He edits The Lancet, a weekly medical journal based in London and New York. He is also a visiting professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Alison Lurie is the author of two collections of essays on children’s literature, Don’t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever. She is a former professor of English at Cornell and has published nine novels, of which the most recent is Truth and Consequences. (May 2008)

Bill Mckibben is scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and the author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-four novels, including The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and, most recently, Folly and Glory. His nonfiction works include a biography of Crazy Horse, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Paradise, and Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (published by New York Review Books). He lives in Archer City, Texas.

Louis Menand is the Robert M. and Anne T. Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of The Metaphysical Club—which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Francis Parkman Prize in 2002—and of American Studies, a collection of essays.

Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and historian specializing in Chinese affairs. (May 2008)

Julian Moynahan is Professor of English Emeritus at Rutgers University. His most recent book is Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. (May 2000)

Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979), Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), and The Confirmation (2000), a novel. He won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 and has contributed to The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone.

Mary Robinson is the former President of Ireland and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (May 2000)

Cathleen Schine is the author of seven novels, including Rameau's Niece, The Love Letter, She is Me, and the forthcoming The New Yorkers. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick University, England. The single-volume abridgment of his three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes was published last year in the US. He is currently completing a short history of Britain in the twentieth century. www.skidelskyr.com. (April 2008)

Tatyana Tolstaya was born in Leningrad in 1951 to an aristocratic family that includes the writers Leo and Alexei Tolstoy. After completing a degree in classics at Leningrad State University, Tolstaya worked for several years at a Moscow publishing house. In the mid-1980s, she began publishing short stories in literary magazines and her first story collection established her as one of the foremost writers of the Gorbachev era. She spent much of the late Eighties and Nineties living in the United States and teaching at several universities. Known for her acerbic essays on contemporary Russian life, Tolstaya has also been the co-host of the Russian cultural interview television program School for Scandal. Both her novel, The Slynx and her collection of stories, White Walls, are published by NYRB Classics.

Garry Wills was born in Atlanta, Georgia. One of our most distinguished historians and critics, he is the author of numerous books, including Saint Augustine, Papal Sin, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln at Gettysburg. He has won many other awards, among them two National Book Critics Circle Awards and the 1998 National Medal for the Humanities. He is currently Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University. A regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, he lives in Evanston, Illinois.


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