Table of Contents
Volume 51, Number 6 · April 8, 2004
William H. McNeill, Weapon of Mass Destruction 
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M. Barry
Steven Weinberg, The Wrong Stuff
Andrew Butterfield, The Visionary
The Art of Parmigianino Catalog of the exhibition by David Franklin, with an essay by David Ekserdjian
William Pfaff, The American Mission?
The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Larry McMurtry, The Lives and Loves of Samuel Clemens
The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography by Fred Kaplan
Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years by Karen Lystra
Stephen Greenblatt, Me, Myself, and I
Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation by Thomas W. Laqueur
John Banville, The Sacrifice
Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake by Carol Loeb Shloss
Gerald Early, Great Adventurer
Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin by John D'Emilio
Time On Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin edited and with an introduction by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise
Al Alvarez, Living Dangerously
Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life by Caroline Moorehead
Amos Elon, The 'Jewish Bismarck'
The Patron: A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959 by Anthony David
Orlando Figes, Murder, Russian Style (poem)
Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran: Alexander Griboyedov and Imperial Russia's Mission to the Shah of Persia by Laurence Kelly
The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia by Richard Pipes
Lost Splendour:The Amazing Memoirs of the Man Who Killed Rasputin by Prince Felix Youssoupoff, translated from the French by Ann Green and Nicholas Katkoff
James Fenton, Shakespeare, Stage or Page?
Shakespeare for All Time by Stanley Wells
Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist by Lukas Erne
The Age of Shakespeare by Frank Kermode
Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life: A Radical Guide to Shakespearean Tragedy by Fintan O'Toole
After Shakespeare: Writing Inspired by the World's Greatest Author edited by John Gross
Ruth Scurr, Homo Erectus
Genesis by Jim Crace
W.S. Merwin, You Can Take It With You
The Dominion of the Dead by Robert Pogue Harrison
Garry Wills, God in the Hands of Angry Sinners
The Passion of the Christ a film directed by Mel Gibson
Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II by Jason Berry and Gerald Renner
Michael Gordon, Dana Milbank, Michael Massing, 'Iraq: Now They Tell Us': An Exchange
Benny Morris, Henry Siegman, 'Israel: The Threat from Within': An Exchange
Steve J. Heims, David Ingle, Benjamin Libet, et al. 'In the River of Consciousness': An Exchange
Letters
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Disgrace at Guantanamo
Contributors
Al Alvarez's most recent book is Risky Business, a selection of essays, many of which first appeared in these pages. (May 2008)
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, and Eclipse. Banville's novel The Sea was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize. On occasion he writes under the pen name Benjamin Black.
Andrew Butterfield is President of Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts. He is the author of The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio. (April 2008)
Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for the Humanities. His latest book is This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s, published last year. (April 2004)
Amos Elon's most recent book is The Pity of It All: German Jews Before Hitler. He is a Fellow at the Center for Law and Security at NYU. (February 2008)
James Fenton's new book, School of Genius, a history of the Royal Academy in London, will be published in the US in May. (May 2006)
Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, London University. His new book, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, will be published this month. (November 2007)
Stephen Greenblatt is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. His play Cardenio, coauthored with Charles Mee, was performed in May and June by the American Repertory Theatre. (July 2008)
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.
William H. McNeill is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. His most recent books are The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir and A Boyhood Memory: Long Ago on Grandfather’s Farm, which is currently in search of a publisher. (April 2008)
W.S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. From 1949 to 1951 he worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca. He has since lived in many parts of the world, most recently on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. He is the author of many books of poems, prose, and translations and has received both the Pulitzer and the Bollingen Prizes for poetry, among numerous other awards.
William Pfaff is an American author and syndicated columnist in Paris. His most recent book is The Bullet’s Song. (December 2007)
Ruth Scurr is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at Cambridge University. She is writing a book about Robespierre. (April 2004)
Steven Weinberg holds the Josey Regental Chair in Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics and the National Medal of Science. His most recent book is Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. (April 2004)
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.
