Table of Contents
Volume 52, Number 5 · March 24, 2005
Clifford Geertz, Very Bad News
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
Catastrophe: Risk and Response by Richard A. Posner
Bill Moyers, Welcome to Doomsday 
Michael Kimmelman, The Undefeated
William Kapell Edition by William Kapell
Ian Buruma, Chinese Shadows
War Trash by Ha Jin
Alexander Keyssar, The Electoral College Flunks
Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America by George C. Edwards III
Andrew Delbanco, The Endangered University
Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education by Derek Bok
The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle,and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment by Geoffrey Kabaservice
Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges edited by Steven Koblik and Stephen R. Graubard
Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson
Liberal Education and the Public Interest by James O. Freedman
Richard Eder, The Conscientious Op
Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley
Frank Kermode, The King of Crit
The Power of Delight: Essays 1962–2002 by John Bayley, selected by Leo Carey
Anne Applebaum, Album from Hell
Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps by Tomasz Kizny
Larry McMurtry, Back to the O.K. Corral
Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend by Casey Tefertiller
Murder in Tombstone: The Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp by Steven Lubet
Oliver Sacks, Remembering Francis Crick
Stephen Kinzer, Clouds Over Iran
In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran by Christopher de Bellaigue
Alan Ryan, Freedom Fighter
John Stuart Mill by Nicholas Capaldi
Elizabeth Drew, He's Back!
Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America by Newt Gingrich
The Enduring Revolution: How the Contract with America Continues to Shape the Nation by Major Garrett
The Republican Revolution 10 Years Later: Smaller Government or Business as Usual? edited by Chris Edwards and John Samples
Contributors
Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post. Her book Gulag: A History won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. She lives in Poland. (July 2009)
Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard. He received the 2008 Erasmus Prize. His novel The China Lover was published in September 2008.
Andrew Delbanco is Levi Professor in the Humanities and Director of American Studies at Columbia. He is working on a book on college education, to be published next year. (May 2009)
Elizabeth Drew, who lives in Washington, is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. She is the author of twelve books.
Richard Eder reviews books for various publications. (March 2005)
Clifford Geertz is Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of, among other works, The Social History of an Indonesian Town and Negara: The Balinese State in the Nineteenth Century. (March 2006)
Frank Kermode lives in Cambridge, England. His most recent book is The Age of Shakespeare. (October 2008)
Alexander Keyssar is Stirling Professor of History and Social Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is the author, most recently, of The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. He is currently writing a history of American electoral rules and institutions. (March 2005)
Michael Kimmelman is chief art critic of The New York Times . He is now based in Berlin, writing the Abroad column for the Times on culture and society across Europe. He is the author of The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa. (September 2008)
Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times bureau chief in Managua, Berlin, and Istanbul, is the author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. He is writing a book about Rwanda. (June 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.
Bill Moyers is the former host of NOW with Bill Moyers
on PBS. He was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, spokesperson for President Lyndon Johnson,
publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS News, and producer of many of public
television's groundbreaking series. He is the winner of more than thirty Emmy Awards, and
the author of the best-selling books Listening to America, A World of Ideas, and Healing
and the Mind. He lives in New York.
Alan Ryan is Warden of New College, Oxford, and the author of biographies of John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey. (October 2008)
Oliver Sacks is a physician and the author of ten books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, An Anthropologist on Mars, and, most recently, Musicophilia. He lives in New York City, where he is University Artist and Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University.
