Table of Contents
Volume 52, Number 7 · April 28, 2005
Freeman Dyson, The Bitter End 
Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944–1945 by Max Hastings
The End: Hamburg 1943 by Hans Erich Nossack, translated from the German and with a foreword by Joel Agee, and with photographs by Erich Andres
Andrew O'Hagan, The Pritchett Sound
V.S. Pritchett: A Working Life by Jeremy Treglown
Max Rodenbeck, A New Lebanon?
Russell Baker, Fathers and Son
Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop by Joseph Lelyveld
Sue M. Halpern, The Moment of Truth?
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger as Your Brain Grows Older by Elkhonon Goldberg
John Lanchester, Where the Fun Starts
Magic Seeds by V.S. Naipaul
Sanford Schwartz, A World of His Own
Manny Farber: About Face
Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies by Manny Farber
Timothy Garton Ash, Timothy Snyder, The Orange Revolution
Gordon S. Wood, The Making of a Disaster
Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's Quagmire: 1775–1783 by Stanley Weintraub
Alan Ryan, The Magic of 'I'
The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Christopher Benfey, The Art of Consolation
Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats by Helen Vendler
Mark Danner, Iraq: The Real Election
Joseph Kerman, Mystery Man
The Life of Bach by Peter Williams
Helen Epstein, God and the Fight Against AIDS
Jeremy Bernstein, Social Insecurity
Merick Chaffee, John Day, Gene Epstein, et al. Working for Wal-Mart: An Exchange
Letters
Larry McMurtry, The Death of Wild Bill Hickok
Contributors
Russell Baker is a former columnist and correspondent for The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. His books include The Good Times, Growing Up, and Looking Back. (November 2008)
Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His book A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade was published in April. (June 2008)
Jeremy Bernstein is a physicist who worked at
Los Alamos. His forthcoming book is about the element plutonium. (May 2006)
Mark Danner, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of three books: The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War; The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Travels Through the 2000 Florida Recount; and Torture and Truth. Danner's work has been honored with many awards, including a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, and an Emmy. In June 1999, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. He divides his time between Berkeley and New York. His work is archived at markdanner.com.
Freeman Dyson has spent most of his life as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, taking time off to advise the US government and write books for the general public. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force during World War II. He came to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman, producing a user-friendly way to calculate the behavior of atoms and radiation. He also worked on nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied.
Dyson's books include Disturbing the Universe (1979), Weapons and Hope (1984), Infinite in All Directions (1988), Origins of Life (1986, second edition 1999), and The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
Helen Epstein's book book The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa was published last year. (August 2008)
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. (November 2008)
Sue Halpern, a frequent contributor to The New York Review, is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. Her new book, Can’t Remember What I Forgot: The Good News From the Front Lines of Memory Research, will be published in May. (April 2008)
Joseph Kerman is emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Berkeley. He began writing music criticism for The Hudson Review in the 1950s, and is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books and many other journals. His books include Opera as Drama (1956; new and revised edition 1988), The Beethoven Quartets (1967), Contemplating Music (1986), Concerto Conversations (1999), and The Art of Fugue (2005).
John Lanchester's most recent book is a memoir, Family Romance. (March 2007)
Andrew O'Hagan's novel Be Near Me has just been published in the US. He is a recipient of the E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (June 2007)
Max Rodenbeck is The Economist’s Mideast Correspondent. He is based in Cairo. (May 2008)
Alan Ryan is Warden of New College, Oxford, and the author of biographies of John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey. (October 2008)
Sanford Schwartz's essays and reviews have been collected in The Art Presence and Artists and Writers. (October 2008)
Timothy Snyder, an associate professor of history at Yale, is the author of The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 and the forthcoming Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. (April 2005)
Gordon Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History at Brown. A collection of his essays, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History, was published in March. (May 2008)
